Trust In Huckleberry Finn

Is trusting someone a good thing? People are taught to simply trust others that are considered to be above them because they are suppose to know better. Whether it is though social status, age, or experience, it is believed that trust should be given. However, blindly trusting, people is not necessarily a good idea under certain circumstances. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain includes characters that are excellent examples of people who should not be blindly followed. Characters such as two conmen, who show how people can just be terrible people looking out for themselves, Tow Sawyer, who exhibits how manipulative and controlling someone can be, or Huck's father, Pap, who illustrates how sometimes, all someone wants is something from someone else. People who are “better” should not be automatically trusted because they are not always worthy of that trust due to who they are and how they act.

These people are only looking out for themselves and could care less about others. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim run into a two conmen who are posing as a king and a duke of foreign countries. Huck knows they’re conmen and yet he still trusts them. The conmen abused Huck’s trust and sell Jim simply because they needed money “After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they…[made Jim] a slave again all his life...for forty dirty dollars” (31). Granted, he may have been a runaway slave, but the king and duke still sold someone for their own benefit. Huck should not have trusted them because they were awful people, regardless of whether or not they were