Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Again, the author ridicules the ability of this collective predisposition toward compassion and mercy to go overboard when he refers to the village’s sentimental forgiveness of the wicked Injun Joe after his decease. Another form of hypocrisy is that the adults shun the kids who believe in superstition, but the kids are just following the examples the adults set. Religion could easily be superstitious (November 2013), and that is what the kids are mimicking, but the rest of society is scornful towards the superstitious children. The children believed so firmly in these superstitions, that it could almost be religious. “...he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the rain-water was" (75). The kids dipping their hands into stump water

By depicting how hard townspeople work together to find Tom and Becky when they are lost in the cave, he lets the reader appreciate how valuable cooperative work is, and how every person’s contribution is worth listening to. The author narrates that “[…] before the horror was half hour old two hundred men were pouring down highroad and river toward the cave (and that) […] many women visited Aunt Polly and Mrs. Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They cried with them too.” (pg. 204). Characters such as Aunt Polly and Mrs. Douglas are noteworthy examples of the intrinsic kindness of man. The former repeatedly shows her pure goodness all throughout the novel when dealing with Tom Sawyer and his behavior. She not only takes care of an orphan child but also withstands all the difficulties that come along when trying to parent him. Likewise, Mrs. Douglas is eager to help Huckleberry Finn become an educated young man even before he becomes rich. As the story tells, her true love and care for him once keeps the widow haunting for Huckleberry everywhere “in great distress” (pg. 204) for forty-eight

Tom is an expert in convincing other boys and girls to do what he requests. The perfect example of this, and by which most people in the world know Tom, is the scene of the whitewash. “Tom swindles his friends out of all their favorite objects through a kind of false advertising when he sells them the opportunity to whitewash the fence” (July 2013), and he does it in such a skillful way that he turns his punishment into a ‘privileged opportunity not often handed to a boy’. His ambition grows stronger every weekend when he goes to church as hears, once and again, about the challenge to get a Doré Bible. For Sawyer, it is much easier to persuade his friends to trade their valuable tickets for other curious ‘treasures’, than to memorize those never-ending verses from the Scriptures. In the end, he gets his Bible, but the author makes sure to remark the fact that, due to his cunningness, Tom was ridiculed in front of everyone. In the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain succeeds to relate characteristics of his society, in the 1840s, to those of later times. He centers his ideas on major topics, but most of the time they revolve on the theme of human nature. The positive aspect of alluding to themes of this kind is that it allows the story to become timeless and never out-of-date.