Literary Ties In Huck Finn

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Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Literary Ties to the Great American Novel Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or Huck Finn for short, follows the titular, unruly young boy and his slave friend Jim down the Mississippi River in the mid-1840s, during the Southern antebellum era. The novel lures readers in with a prologue of the precedent book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, informing us that Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer found a band of robbers’ gold stash, got rich off of it, and split off temporarily when Widow Douglas adopts Huck Finn and tries to civilize him, to no avail. Using motifs of lies and childhood, Huck Finn is supported by themes of racism, defiance of society, and moral hypocrisy. These…show more content…
To begin with, Jim’s treatment as a black man is a theme as old as American literature. Jim was intended to be sold by Miss Watson, despite her claiming the opposite (and Jim having a family), and he regards Huck as “the on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim [sic]” (Twain 85). In the aforementioned quote, Jim reveals a few of his attributes; he reveals that he is grateful of Huck’s help and regards him as a good man, yet during this era, blacks were regarded as jokers who could not act decently. He also divulges his experience with white people in this line, implying that Miss Watson was not the first white person to backstab him. Jim was not alone in his struggles, as the slaves of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can testify. Not only do they get sold away from their families, they are beaten, cussed at, and become the scapegoat when conflict arises. The abuse of the slaves raises to the point where a slave owner proclaims, “Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!” (Stowe 163). Through their arduous journey, both Twain’s Jim and Stowe’s slaves find that their people, no matter how wise and moral they can be, will be considered inferior to whites, even if the white man is

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