Pap Finn Influence

Abusive, derogatory, and malevolent, Pap Finn represents the epitome of an uneducated and underprivileged lower class. Pap’s crude dialect, disorderly conduct, and frequent rants demonstrate and convey the opinions of those in society who feel that their human rights remain diminished and overshadowed. Mark Twain, in his nineteenth century novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exploits the character, through the use of dramatic, rhetoric-filled rants, of individuals in society who urge for a fairer representation and division of their innate, human rights. Thus, Twain promotes the fulfillment of a greater understanding of one’s civil liberties and their influence.

In general, the literature focuses on the common attitudes of an unforgiving

A sense of inability to improve and expand life status and condition leads, inevitably, to the mental incapability to reason and maintain an adequate lifestyle. Pap Finn, consistently caught in the influence and negative perceptions of a self-made societal position, struggles to accept Huckleberry’s transformation into an individual of class. Pap’s lack of compliance and misinterpretation of intentions leads to the belief of Huck becoming “better’n your father,” as due to the gradual attainment of knowledge, and surpassing himself in societal position “because he can’t [read]” (Twain 31). Mark Twain instructs, through the depiction of the character of Pap Finn, how individuals fail to sustain a substantial way of life as a result of a prior determinant of social class and perception of subordination to others. Furthermore, Twain urges for an abolishment and end to the negative, degrading attitudes resulting from a misinterpreted societal standing. The character, political views, and opinions of Pap Finn remain distinct of a nineteenth century poor white class, stubborn and discriminatory in ideals: “Pap's drunken tirade against the free Negro not only reveals the prejudice common to Pap's poor-white class, and his unwillingness to recognize that this black man does not conveniently conform to the popular stereotype of the typical plantation slave…” (Piacentino 20). Stuck in

Why, just look at it and see what it’s like. Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him - a man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin’ for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call that a govment! That ain’t all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o’ my property. Here’s what the law does. The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and upards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain’t fitten for a hog. They call that govmet! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. (Twain