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Realistic characters in the adventures of huckleberry finn
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Character analysis
Theory The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Why Huck Finn is Superstitious
"Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn't need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me" (1204).
"Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it" (1241).
Why is Huck Finn so superstitious? Has Huck's father had a large influence on Huck?
Huck Finn is very superstitious. While he doesn't "take much stock" in prayer, the Bible, heaven, or hell, he strongly believes in signs of bad luck. I think that Huck Finn is so superstitious because every time he has some bad luck, he considers it proof that his superstitions are real. These incidents of misfortune happen randomly, interspersed with good luck, but Huck is convinced that his superstitions foretell the bad luck. The superstitions seem to always come true, so Huck puts his faith in them. He doesn't have the same faith in religion or prayer, because he sees no evidence that they affect him. He doesn't believe in anything based on faith alone.
When Miss Watson tells Huck that if he prays every day he'll get whatever he asks for, Huck informs the reader, "I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work" (1208). Huck concludes, ". . . I couldn't see any advantage about it [prayer] . . . so at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it go" (1208-09). This shows that Huck does not "take stock" in anything that doesn't immediately affect him. However, when Huck accidentally flicks a spider into a candle, which is supposedly a sign of extreme bad luck, he is afraid and tries to ward off the bad luck. Also, when Huck dumps the salt-cellar over at breakfast and Miss Watson prevents him from throwing some over his shoulder, he believes that this means he will have great misfortune.
In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you meet a rebellious young teen named Huck Finn. Huck is not your everyday hero, especially in the beginning of the novel, but slowly through the story his mature, responsible side comes out and he shows that he truly is the epitome of a hero. Huck is forced to make many crucial decisions, which could get him in serious trouble if not get him killed. Huck has natural intelligence, has street smarts, which are helpful along his adventures, and is assertive. Huck has always had to rely on himself to get through things because he is from the lowest levels of white society and his dad is known more or less as the "town drunk."
Huck Finn is a very self-reliant person and he shows it in his thoughts and actions throughout the book. Self reliance is to use your mind on your own to be able to do things. Just as Emerson said, “A weed is a plant with wise virtues which have not yet been discovered.” Huck throughout the book is a boy searching for himself. Huck is self reliant because he does not know what he wants but through testing situations he discovers what he likes. Huck tries school but realizes it isn’t for him. He is self reliant because he is able to make choices on his own without any help.. Another example of self reliance in Huck is his ability to use what ever means he can, to get out of tight situations. Throughout the book Huck uses elaborate tales and lies to help him get through life.
Throughout the book it is obvious that there are characteristics that Mark Twain either detests and despises, or respects and values them. Twain quite obviously is making fun of the undesirable characteristics such as the natural curiosity of people and also the greed for money. Although there are not many values that he respects, there is one that is shown in this book, friendship.
You Can’t Pray A Lie is a pivotal excerpt taken from Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain’s other works, this example of moral truth and consequence undermines the basic sense of human values. Set in the 1880’s on a raft upon the Mississippi River, Huck is caught in a battle of personal conflicting views. It is through his interactions with Jim, a runaway black slave, that he faces the realization that being ultimately true to himself means that he cannot “pray a lie.”
One of the most noticeable traits of Huck's personality that reflect his opinion on religion and spirituality is that he often dismisses such popularly accepted beliefs as Moses (because he is dead), but will put his faith into a hairball that he believes is magic because it was taken from an oxen's stomach and therefore he believes that "it had a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything" (38). In fact, he even asks it about his father and supplies it with a fake coin for it's services. Perhaps Huck truly believes in it, or he is searching for something to believe in that he could depend on. In either case, he is wise enough not to give it his real dollar.
He leaves his strict and hostile home and ventures into society to choose what he wants to believe and what rules he wants to follow. In this process, he goes from being very childish and blithe to maturing into a wise and caring young man. Huck starts thinking before acting and putting others feelings before his own. He learns who he truly is, as people in the today’s society often do. When we are born, our parents instill their personal beliefs into our minds, and we do not learn to think for ourselves until we leave home. This is exactly how Huck Finn finds himself in the novel. His journey of finding himself as he travels down the river represents our journey of finding ourselves throughout
Look inside any teenage girl magazine and one will find a page dedicated to horoscopes. From celebrities hiring their own astrologists to girls reading about their star signs, interpreting the stars and planets is very popular. Perhaps people want an answer to their questions or some insight on how to handle a situation. Reading his or her horoscope gives one the opportunity to understand the world around them, which is similar to the role of superstition in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain, in his American Realistic novel, utilizes superstition in order to help the characters understand life and search for the truth (Cohen 68). Therefore, superstition plays an important role in the development of the characters in the novel.
Huckleberry Finn was a young boy who was not blessed with the best life and roles models. He was twelve with no parents and lived with Miss Watson who’s a Christian but was owned slaves. Huck was raised in the South where they treated African Americans as property and would do anything they wanted with them. So right off the bat Huck’s biggest influence was society. When others get away with things then you think also that you can do the same.
Twain’s skeptical take on religion can be elicited because superstition is a theme that both Huck and Jim bring up several times. Although both of these characters tend to be quite rational, they quickly become irrational when anything remotely superstitious happens to them. The role of superstition in this book is two-fold: First, it shows that Huck and Jim are child-like in spite of their otherwise extremely mature characters. Second, it serves to foreshadow the plot at several key junctions. For example, spilling salt leads to Pa returning for Huck, and later Jim gets bitten by a rattlesnake after Huck touches a snakeskin with his hands.
Civilization is defined as the human social development in which people are “sophisticated” and “enlightened”. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, he writes a story about a Southern boy named Huck who befriends a black slave during the time of slavery. Twain shows us that the protagonist, Huck is not well educated by using the word “sivilized”, yet despite this, he is one of the most sophisticated and logical thinker in the story. Throughout his misadventures, Huck sees the inhumanity and lies in what is so called “sivilization”. The untold truths of a “sivilized” society leads Huck to later decides that there is no need for “sivilization” for it is just an empty word that defies logical ideas and clouds up the
Huck’s habit in telling stories to get himself out of tight situations has been a continuous trend throughout the chapters. It can be inferred throughout the novel with evidence like stealing the food but not taking certain types of food that shows that Huck’s morality is yet to be finalized. Still young in age, he is easily imprinted through experiences. In Chapter 16, Huck is revealed to have an internal conflict between what he was taught was the right thing to do versus what he has actually experienced. The result is that Huck eventually creates another story that saves Jim yet again. Huck then concludes
-The man vs. man conflict is brought up many times throughout this story. The first that is posed is the conflict between Huckleberry and Pap. Pap is Huckleberry’s abusive biological father, and an alcoholic to boot. He first comes in and tries to steal his son’s fortune, just so he can get drunk. Huckleberry is kidnapped by his father for a short time, and during this is beaten many times. Huckleberry eventually escapes as he saws his way out of a shed with an old saw he finds. He then kills a pig to fake his own death and smears blood all over the shed so the story is more believable.
Twain introduces the reader to Huck Finn as an uneducated, uncivilized teenager. Twain makes Huck’s evolution in the beginning of the story slightly harder to decipher, as he is still developing, and figuring out society way’s, his own ways, and Tom Sawyer’s ways. And Huck is seen as a “new guy” in the Twain author series, and is apparently “worthy” of the illustrious Tom
At the beginning of the tale, Huck struggles between becoming ?sivilized? and doing what he pleases. He doesn?t want to listen to the rules that the Widow Douglas and her sister force upon him, even though he knows the widow only wants what is best for him. Miss Watson pushes Huck away from society even more through the way she treats him. She teaches him religion in such a dreary way that when she speaks of heaven and hell, Huck would rather go to hell than be in heaven with her: ?And she told all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there?I couldn?t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn?t try for it? (12-13). Huck is taught a very different kind of morality by his father who believes ?it warn?t no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back?? (70). He likes his father?s idea of morality better because he is not yet mature enough to fully understand right and wrong, although living with the widow...