The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Essay paper

The book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, there are different themes that Mark Twain tries to bring out that can be found when one keenly goes through the light-hearted and youthful adventure story. Although the novel was written several years after slavery had already been banned in America, the book is set several decades earlier when slavery and racism was still a troubling fact. When one views the book from a different perspective, the writer is simply trying to give out a picture about the conditions of racism and slavery during the period. At the end of the civil war, there was hope that racism wouldn’t be as strained as it was during the war. However, in the novel Twain still depicts the picture of just hope bad the black people still had it during because of the difference in their skin color.

Slavery could have easily been done away with but when the white people living in the south decide to enact laws using the excuse of their safety against the new free black slaves the black people view this as immoral and discriminatory and even opt to act on it. Even though the time setting of the novel was when slavery had already been abolished, the black people living in the South of the state dint have it any easy being black and Twain sets his novel a few decades back to give the readers a clear honest picture of the nature of racism and slavery at the time.

The book is set in the late 19th century in a rural part of the state along the Mississippi river where the main dominants in the society are the white people who look down at the African American living in the area and treat them with a lot of cruelty and discrimination. The main character in the story is Jim Crow who Twain uses a representatio...

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...elty that the African Americans are forced to live with simply because of the fact that they are black.

In chapter 6 when Pap is talking to a free black man, when he finds out that black men are free to vote in the state, he states, "but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote again” (Twain, 78). The statement is rather irrational considering that one would actually not to vote because of the mere fact that black men are free to vote in the state.

Mark Twain does a superb job in bringing out the differences of the lives and hard times that the black people had to endure during the 19Th century never being treated as equals of the white people. Additionally, the writer does a great job in making people realize that racism does not only affect the oppressed, but also the oppressors.