HUCKLEBERRY FINN BY MARK
TWAIN
INTRODUCTION :
Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn or otherwise called “ Huck “ is a young boy. He is
thirteen or fourteen. Huckleberry is, unfortunately, motherless and
Huck is a wanderer. Huck does not hesitate to lie, to steal, he is
resourceful and adapts to all situations. He tries several times to
integrate into society but his actions stop abruptly. A widow adopts it:
Huck does not support this life. After all the adventures that will
unfold, he will decide to change. Huck will meet a slave named Jim.
By meeting the slave Jim, Huck certainly changed his way of life, his
way of thinking. All these adventures will surely make it grow and
make it more mature. That's where Huckleberry Finn comes from.
THE SLAVERY
The novel itself is before the American Civil War, while slavery was
still legal and natural at the time. the southern United States. Many
characters in Twain's novel are themselves, black slaves, like Miss
Watson. While other characters indirectly benefit from slavery, the
fugitive slave of Miss Watson, Jim, is in exchange for a large sum of
money.
While slave owners take advantage of slavery, slaves themselves are
oppressed, exploited, and abused physically and mentally. Jim is
unfortunately removed from his wife and children. Meanwhile, black
slave owners rationalize oppression, exploitation, and abuse of black
slaves by securing the ridiculous racist stereotype that blacks are
mentally inferior to whites.
In this way, slave owners and racist whites hurt blacks, but they also
do moral harm by mischievously interpreting what we are, a human,
for profit. At the beginning of the novel, Huck himself adheres to racial
stereotypes and even reprimands himself for not accusing Jim of
running away. Jim happens to be a better man than most of the other
people Huck has met so far.
HUCK AND THE SLAVE JIM
When Huckleberry Finn decided to go to Jackson Island, he met Jim.
But Jim is Miss Watson's slave and he's black. Jim is the slave of the
adoptive mothers of Huckleberry.
Huck kindly begins to become a good friend with Jim, the fugitive
slave and treats him as an equal person. He knows that people of
color are often treated in very unfair ways: when a black man is
suspected of anything, he is often insulted and then hanged. After all,
Huck, although a kid, is a white skin person and he's totally free to
denounce Jim and get a great and nice reward for doing it. However,
at some point, he wonders if, in conscience, it is not immoral to help
Jim escape to the detriment of Miss Watson. He did not feel
comfortable either, because he was beginning to think that Jim was
already free. And Huckleberry was scared because if we discovered
them together, they would both have very big problems. He had not
thought about it or even crossed his mind, but this situation troubled
him. Huck's father would have rushed to arrest a runaway slave, even
without a reward. He would never have helped, speak a black man
apart to denigrate him. Huck did not advise Jim to escape. A black
man who flees is a thief, and he has helped steal the property of poor
Miss Watson, who wanted only good for Huck.
BAD SOCIETY
By reading excerpts from the book, Huck lives in a society based on
rules and traditions that are both ridiculous and inhumane. At the
beginning of the novel, Douglas' widow, Huck's tutor and sister, Miss
Watson, try to "civilize" Huck, acknowledging that these lessons are
more important for the dead to live. The educated and the "civilized",
like the widow Douglas and Miss Watson, the practice of Christianity
among the uneducated and the poor, like Huck and Jim, have
superstitions. Huck, despite the supervision of Widow Douglas and
Miss Watson, Miss Watson, extremely rigid, is the foundation of
Christianity, while it seems more and more difficult to understand its
reality.
According to Christian values established in the southern United
States, Huck is condemned to Hell for doing well by saving Jim from
slavery. I think that anyway, Jim is the character who establishes and
creates a new moral framework in the novel, a framework that can
not be taken over by society in the service of immoral institutions like
slavery.
After Huck leaves the care of widow Douglas, however, he is exposed
to even darker aspects of society, aspects in which people do
ridiculous and illogical things, often with violent consequences. Huck
meets good families arguing for no reason.
Even at the beginning of the novel, a judge ridiculously grants Huck
custody to an abusive drunkard of a father, Pap. The judge says that
Pap has the legal right to custody of Huck. Yet, no matter what his
right, Pap turns out to be a bad guardian, denying Huck the
opportunity to educate himself, hitting Huck, and imprisoning him in a
secluded cabin. In such a case, the respect for Pap's legal right would
be ridiculous for Huck's well-being. Moreover, Pap's abuse and
imprisonment of Huck are implicitly compared to a more pervasive
and deeply rooted social problem, namely the institutionalized
enslavement of blacks. Huck confirms and recognizes that slavery is
an oppressively inhuman institution, on which no truly "civilized"
society can be founded. People like Sally Phelps, who look good but
are racist slavers, are perhaps the biggest hypocrites that Huck
meets on his travels.
HUCK GROWS
Huck matures as he expands his horizons with new experiences and
adventures. Huck begins the novel as an immature young boy who
likes to have fun with his childhood friend, Tom Sawyer, play tricks
with others and sometimes make fools. Despite everything, He has a
good heart but a distorted consciousness by the society in which he
was raised so that he reprimands himself again and again for not
mutilating Jim for running away, as if sending Jim back and to extend
his separation from his family was the right thing to do.
However, as the book develops, Huck's notions of good and bad also
evolve in him. He also recognizes that absolute selfishness, like that
of Tom Sawyer, and that of his worst jokers, the duke, and the king,
are both youthful and shameful. Huck learns that he has to follow the
moral intuitions of his heart, which requires him to be flexible to
respond to moral dilemmas. And indeed, it is by following his heart
that Huck makes the right decision to help Jim escape slavery and
servitude.
This mature moral decision contrasts with the immature way in which
Tom acts. Later in the book, Tom devises a childish ploy to free Jim,
which results in Tom being shot in the leg and Jim being taken back
while Tom could have just helped Jim in a simpler way. Through
some passages, I realize that Huck is morally mature and realistic,
while Tom still has a lot of personal work to grow.
CONCLUSION
Huck and Jim both yearn for freedom. Huck wants to free himself
from petty ways and societal values. He wants to free himself from
his violent father, who goes as far as imprisoning Huck literally in a
hut. Perhaps more than anything, Huck wants to be free to be able to
think independently and do what his heart tells him to do. Likewise,
Jim wants to free himself from bondage so he can return to his wife
and children, which he knows to be his natural right.
The place where Huck and Jim go for freedom is the natural world.
Although nature imposes new constraints and new dangers on both
countries, including what Huck calls "loneliness," a sense of no
protection against the lack of a sense of death, nature also provides
refuges for society and even his own dangers. In such shelters, Huck
and Jim are free to be themselves and they can also enjoy remote
safety. That said, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn imply that
people can be free enough to be, ironically enough, imprisoned in
themselves. Freedom is good, but only to the extent that the free
person is bound to the moral intuitions of his heart. I think this book is
full of adventures and lessons. It also makes the reader understand
some situations of life in ancient times that perhaps will never meet.
