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Research paper on the adventures of huckleberry finn
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Are humans naturally good, or evil? Many people argue both ways. It has been argued for centuries, and many authors have written about it. One example of this is Samuel Clemens's, more commonly known as Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The book follows a young boy, named Huckleberry, and a runaway slave, named Jim, as they both run away. Huck runs away to escape being civilized, while Jim runs away from slavery. Together, they talk about life, philosophy, and friends. As they travel down the Mississippi River, both Huck and Jim learn various life lessons. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck witnesses the depravity of human nature on his journey on the Mississippi River.
Huck witnesses the depravity of human nature when experiences the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. After Huck and Jim get split up on the Mississippi River, Huck spends some time living on the Grangerford’s estate. He befriends a Grangerford named Buck, and the two of them spend a lot of time together. Buck explains that the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons have been feuding for years, although no one quite remember why. Huck does not understand the point of a feud. Buck goes on and explains, “A feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time” (Twain 107). Huck cannot comprehend the point of a feud, especially since in this case Buck cannot pinpoint the cause of the feud. Later, Buck died from gunshots from the guns of the Shepherdsons. Huck is devastat...
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...rced to watch mourning people be taken advantage of, and not be able to do anything about it. This upsets Hucks, and shows him how depraved human nature is for material gains.
On Huckleberry Finn’s adventure on the Mississippi, Huck sees the depravity of human nature in various circumstances. He first sees it when he goes to the Grangerfords, and sees a good friend murdered over a pointless feud. Later, he witnesses it when he goes to Pikesville. He watches the King take advantage of good people because he is greedy. Lastly, he notices it at the Wilks’s estate, when he sees the King and Duke steal money, while at the same time not being able to do anything about it. Therefore, according to Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, human nature is naturally bad.
Works Cited
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Bantam Dell, 1884. Print.
The use of violence used by Twain in his novel is when Huck and his friend, an escaped slave Jim, are separated from one another after a storm on the river. Huck survives the storm and swims to shore. He then finds the Grangerford’s household and stays with the family. Because of Huck’s positions he is stuck in the middle of a feud the Grangerfords have with an opposing family, the Shepherdsons. Huck time spent with the Grangerfords causes him to grow a close relationship with Buck but while fighting with the other family, Buck is shot right in front of Huck and dies in the river. "I ain't a-going to tell all that happened- it would make me sick again if I was to do that," (Twain 115). The violence portrayed in this scene is horrifying that
	When Huck encounters the Grangerfords and Shepardsons he describes Colonel Grangerford as, " …a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family"(Twain 86). On Sunday when Huck goes to church he sees the hypocriticalism of the families, "The men took their guns along, …The Shepardsons done the same. I t was pretty ornery preaching-all about brotherly love, and such-like…" (Twain 90).
Huck has been raised in a high-class society where rules and morals are taught and enforced. He lives a very strict and proper life where honesty and adequacy is imposed. Huck being young minded and immature, often goes against these standards set for him, but are still very much a part of his decision-making ability and conscience. When faced to make a decision, Hucks head constantly runs through the morals he was taught. One of the major decisions Huck is faced with is keeping his word to Jim and accepting that Jim is a runaway. The society part of Hucks head automatically looks down upon it. Because Huck is shocked and surprised that Jim is a runaway and he is in his presence, reveals Hucks prejudice attitude that society has imposed on him. Huck is worried about what people will think of him and how society would react if they heard that Huck helped save a runaway slave. The unspoken rules th...
Upon arriving at Cairo, Huck must decide if he should go along with society and turn Jim in as a runaway slave, or keep his promise to his friend, and see him through to freedom. Huck feels guilty not turning Jim in when he hears him talking about hiring an abolitionist to steal his family. He does not think it is right to help take away slaves from people that he doesn 't even know. To turn Jim in for these reasons would be the influence of society on Huck. Huck 's decision on this matter marks another major step in Huck 's moral progression, because he decides not to turn in Jim on his own. This is the first time he makes a decision all on his own based on his own morality. They stop at Grangerford’s Farm, in Tennessee, after the raft is temporality destroyed. With Huck busy with the Grangerford family, Jim was able to rebuild the raft. Huck just met the Grangerfords, but fits right in immediately. He later feels that someone should take the time to write poetry about Emmeline Grangerford, recently deceased, since she always took the time to write about other people who died. He even tries to write the poetry himself, but it doesn 't turn out right. Then he also sees people shooting at each other makes him sick to his stomach. He sees it as an act against humanity and he simply cannot relate or understand how humans can treat each other in such an uncivil
One aspect of the novel in which Twain uses satire is the idea of family feuds. Midway through the novel, Huck meets young Buck Grangerford. Huck soon learns of an everlasting feud existing between the Grangerfords and the neighboring family, the Shepherdsons. Buck explains to Huck his fierce hatred for the Shepherdson family, but also that he truly doesn’t know why there is a feud or how it came to be. The reader finds out that the two feuding families essentially switch off killing members of the opposing family.
Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest American novels ever written. The story is about Huck, a young boy who is coming of age and is escaping from his drunken father. Along the way he stumbles across Miss Watson's slave, Jim, who has run away because he overhead that he would be sold. Throughout the story, Huck is faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to turn Jim in. Mark Twain has purposely placed these two polar opposites together in order to make a satire of the society's institution of slavery. Along the journey, Twain implies his values through Huck on slavery, the two-facedness of society, and represents ideas with the Mississippi River.
When the middle of the novel comes around Huck begins to distinguish what is right and wrong in life and begins to mature and do the right thing. He shows this when he chooses not to partake in the scam that the King and the Duke are playing on the Wilks family. Instead he takes the money back from the King and Duke to hide it because he believes it is only fair to the family. "I'm letting him rob her of her money...I feel so ornery and low...I got to steal that money somehow; and I got to steal it some way that they wont suspicion I done it" (Twain 133) This shows that Huck is starting to see the line between games and real life.
Ever since the day the book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was introduced to the readers, the critical world has been littered with numerous essays and theses on Mark Twain’s writing achievement, yet many of them are about the writing style of Bildungsroman, the symbolic meanings of the raft and Mississippi river, the morality and racism color. Whereas few of them ever talked about why Mark Twain wrote so many lies in this novel. Probably because people usually thought that the splendor of this masterpiece will be obscured by the immorality nature of lying. But actually this is no the thing, even Mark Twain himself does’t think lying is an immoral thing. As what he said in his lecture on a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, the essay later published as “On The Decay of the Art of Lying” , he called the art of lying “a Virtue, a Principle...a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal” (Twain, “On The Decay of the Art of Lying”). We can see that Mark Twain has a mature understanding about the value of lying and he wanted to share with us his philosophy of lying through Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Therefore, the major task of the paper is to investigate this philosophy of lying in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Huck is disgusted and ashamed at what the men are doing. He describes it with lots of
Human nature is the most debated topic to date. Many people think that mankind is programmed to be evil; on the other hand people argue that it is naturally good. Nathaniel Hawthorne gave his argument with the novel, The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter showed that mankind is innately good by Chillingworth’s measures, Hester’s capitulates and Dimmesdale’s noble qualities.
After a ferryboat accident, Huck seems to lose his slave companion Jim after coming ashore. Huck then is introduced to Buck Grangerford (about the same age as Huck) and is allowed to stay in the Grangerford household. The Grangerford family consists of Buck, who is a young adventurous boy, Emmiline, a fourteen-year-old who was dead girl, Bob, Tom, Miss Charlotte, and Miss Sophia. The Grangerfords showed all the signs of being upper class by having an extremely nice house, acting properly, and each member of the family had their own servant. Eventually it becomes apparent to Huck that the Grangerfords are feuding with a neighboring household, the Sheperdsons; this seems to be the central angle Twain uses to satire.
Mark Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through much criticism and denunciation has become a well-respected novel. Through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy, Huckleberry Finn, Twain illustrates the controversy of racism and slavery during the aftermath of the Civil War. Since Huck is an adolescent, he is vulnerable and greatly influenced by the adults he meets during his coming of age. His expedition down the Mississippi steers him into the lives of a diverse group of inhabitants who have conflicting morals. Though he lacks valid morals, Huck demonstrates the potential of humanity as a pensive, sensitive individual rather than conforming to a repressive society. In these modes, the novel places Jim and Huck on pedestals where their views on morality, learning, and society are compared.
While adventuring in the wild, Huck feels free from societal expectations, but his encounters with other people along the river remind him that humanity is deeply flawed. On the river, Huck’s encounter with slave-catchers irreversibly sets him on a path to seeing slavery’s hypocrisy. After realizing he is technically helping a runaway slave escape, he says,“I got to feeling so mean and miserable I most wished I was dead” (Twain 89). Clearly, society’s ideals have a strong hold on his moral core. Although he may not understand their opinions, the people around him still affect his values. This is seen as Huck struggles between his own moral conscience and societal expectations. Influenced by the behavior of people around him, he even looks down
Subsequently, Huck continues his journey down the river to another town where he suddenly finds himself staying with the Grangerfords. Huck soon befriends a boy named Buck who tells him all about the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Both have been fighting for over 30 years but neither of them know exactly why they are battling each other. Buck explains, ??but they don?t know now what the row was about in the first place?(180). The tribal ware fare of the families is suppressed with religion.
Are human beings born to be good? Or are we naturally born to be evil? A person’s nature or essence is a trait that is inherent and lasting in an individual. To be a good person is someone who thinks of others before themselves, shows kindness to one another, and makes good choices in life that can lead to a path of becoming a good moral person. To be a bad person rebels against something or someone thinking only of them and not caring about the consequences of their actions. Rousseau assumed, “that man is good by nature (as it is bequeathed to him), but good in a negative way: that is, he is not evil of his own accord and on purpose, but only in danger of being contaminated and corrupted by evil or inept guides and examples (Immanuel Kant 123).” In other words, the human is exposed to the depraved society by incompetent guardians or influences that is not of one’s free will in the view of the fact that it is passed on. My position is humans are not by nature evil. Instead, they are good but influenced by the environment and societies to act in evil ways to either harm others or themself.