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Lying In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

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Lying is an often occurring theme in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. On the very first paged Huckleberry tells the reader that the truth is often stretched. Huck comedically mentions that one might recognise him from the book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This book, however, was written by a man named Mark Twain who only mainly told the truth. The majority of the protagonists are very talented liers. This is shown through the characters Huckleberry Finn, the King and the Duke, and Tom Sawyer. These characters all lie, but they lie in different ways and for different reasons.
Huckleberry Finn lies numerous times throughout the story.Huck is very quick-witted and clever in how he deceives people. Huck’s reasoning for lying is to either …show more content…

At first we do not know this. Tom lies only for the thrill of it. Tom is easily excited by adventure and loves to follow the rules of the books. Throughout the story, Huckleberry Finn paints Tom Sawyer as his hero and is very pleased to stumble across him at Aunt Sally’s house. Jim was brought to Aunt Sally’s place and ‘imprisoned’. When Tom hears of this he became very excited and told Huck that he is going to help him break Jim out. Huck is very startled that Tom of all people would help a runaway slave, but was glad for the help. Both Tom and Huck come up with plans for freeing Jim. Huck, knowing that he does not have much say in the matter, says that “I went to think out a plan, but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right plan was going to come from” (pg 232). Tom then declares a plan that involves a lot of sneaking around and makes Jim’s life miserable. To top it off, on the day of the break out, Tom tells the family of an attempt to free Jim and they come out with guns and put all of their lives at risk. When Aunt Polly comes down and clears things up, we learn that Jim was already freed by Miss Watson. Mark Twain, as a consequence for Tom’s lying, does one of the worst things an author can do to a character. Twain makes the reader really irritated with Tom for the miserable things he does to Aunt Sally, Huck, and Jim and then the reader finds out it was all for naught. This makes everyone really

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