Huckleberry Finn Literary Analysis

In the year of eighteen eighty-four, a soon to be world renounced book had just been published, a book that had taken seven years for the author to write. At the first look, the book seemed very straightforward as it was about a boy who runs away from home and goes on an adventure, but the reality is there is a lot of satirical meaning hidden inside of the novel. In the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark twain, a young boy by the name of Huckleberry Finn is running away from his drunken father and meets Jim, Widow Douglas’s slave who was running away to the North to be freed from slavery. Together they attempt to make it to the North up the Mississippi river. Along this route, the two of them have many adventures. Using these

However, this all occurred as Huck developed and shaped up into an older boy who would eventually represent everything necessary in a society according to Mark Twain. Before that development occurred, though, he was just as racist as everyone else was. For instance, when Huck was telling the story of King Solomon to Jim and Jim was having difficulty understanding Huck because Huck was explaining it all wrong, Huck says to himself, “I never see such a nigger” (Twain, 78). Huck, despite his age, considers himself to be smarter than Jim because of Jim’s racial ethnicity, even though Jim is much older than Huck is. Huck only considers race to be the determining factor in a person’s intelligence, not someone’s age and experience. Huck eventually matures and this maturity leads to him noticing things and realizing the truth behind stuff that he would have just laughed at a few weeks ago. When Huck and Jim were on the raft and Jim was crying about leaving his wife and children, Huck thinks to himself, “…He was just sitting there with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn’t take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n” (Twain, 155). Huck realizes that black people were not much different than white people, that the color of the people did not matter. He realizes that it’s what’s on the inside, the feelings, are what make a human truly human. He realizes that Jim is a very good person and deserves to be free. This is Mark Twain’s true definition of civilization. He wants everyone to be as accepting as the man that Huck was developing into. He wants the white people and the colored