‘All Right, Then, I’ll Go to Hell’

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Recommended: Character of Huck in Huckleberry finn

Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set during Antebellum America, the pre-Civil War era approximately around the early 1800s, on the Mississippi River. The starting town on Huck’s adventure, St. Petersburg, Missouri, was heavily influenced with racial beliefs. Here, young, naive Huck is raised in a racially biased family who believe those of color are not humans but merely property. Soon, Huckleberry flees from his father on a raft in the river and meets up with a runaway “nigger” named Jim. As the story line progresses, Huck begins a moral and ethical maturation with viewpoints that differ from this father’s, and that of society’s, due to a new relationship he forms with Jim. As seen through the events laid out in the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s changing relationship with Jim and perspective on African Americans and the practice of slavery contributes to Huck’s moral and ethical maturation.
Although Huckleberry Finn is more morally and ethically mature than most Southerners, his traditional Southern attitude and viewpoints are visible before he forms a bond with Jim. When Tom and Huck were stealing candles from Miss Watson, Tom “wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun; but I said no;…Tom said he slipped Jim’s hat off of his head and hung it on a limb right over him…Jim said the witches bewitched him and…then set him under the trees again and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it.” (Twain 4-5) While Huck did not participate in this joke, he did not stop Tom. This shows that Huck is more mature than most boys his age, but does not care for Jim, therefore all of those of color, enough to stop someone from pranking him into thinking he was witched. Huck has yet to connect with...

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.... Even Brownell agrees that “…by Jims presence, his personality, his actions, his words, to call forth from Huckleberry Finn a depth of tenderness and moral strength that could not otherwise have been fully and convincingly revealed to the reader” or to Huckleberry himself (Frances)….

Works Cited

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.
Church J. The Cylinder-Head Episode in ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Explicator [serial online]. October 2012;70(4):300. Available from: Master FILE Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed March 31, 2014.
Frances V. Brownell, “The Role of Jim in Huckleberry Finn,” in Boston Studies in English, Bol. 1, 1955, pp. 74-83.
Smith, Henry Nash. "A Sound Heart and a Deformed Concience." Mark Twain; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. N. pag. Print.

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