Huckleberry Finn River Analysis

In the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, the protagonist, Huckleberry Finn, see the mississippi river as a way to escape the “sivilized” world as he calls it. He runs away from that world because he feels it imprisons him and forces him to act in a way he doesn’t feel comfortable. When he runs to the river he feels happy, since no one can get to him and it is both quiet and peaceful where he can just lay back and relax and just be himself with no one else telling him what to do or who to be. The importance of the river is described many times when he uses it to get from place to place. Although Huckleberry preferred the freedom he got from the river he still learned a lot through experiences he went through while on

He hated when they would try to educate them and didn’t like the hypocrisy they showed. When he wanted to smoke he wasn’t allowed because it wasn’t clean, yet she had done it herself, “I wanted to smoke… But she wouldn’t let me...of course that was all right, because she done it too,” (Twain 2). His father was abusive towards him and when he hoped that the law would save him it just threw it right back at him. “The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge...he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families,” (Twain 22). The law which is supposed to protect the people of the land, it forced Huckleberry back into the dangerous abusive life he hoped to get a away from, and when his father got word that Huckleberry couldn’t leave, he locked him up in his cabin and made him move out of the widow’s house into his and Huckleberry looked for a way to escape, “I found an old rusty wood-saw without any handle...I greased it up and went to work,” (Twain 26). In the end he decided that running away was his only option left to him and when he saw the opportunity he took it, “I reckoned...take to the woods when I run away...and so get so far away that the old man nor the widow couldn’t ever find me any more,” (Twain 27). The Mississippi River was a symbol of freedom to