huck fin

Why Huck is Realistic and Tom is Imaginative

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the connection between Huck and Tom is contrasted several times throughout the novel such as in the beginning of the novel Twain introduced them as friends who were always around each other. Then by the middle of the book Twain shows how Huck lives and thinks for himself out on the frontier and how he uses Jim as a father figure. By the end of the novel Huck and Tom reunite and that’s where Twain gets to touch up and finish up on the contrasting and comparing of Tom and Huck, which will show how Huck grows up and becomes wiser than Tom whom he looked up too.

In the beginning of the book Twain shows how Huck lives and how he was brought up without a real family. Huck is only thirteen and his father even through Pap is a town drunk, but Pap is not a big part of Huck’s life he has still affected how Huck lives because Huck never had a father to look up to. Twain will introduce a father figure to us in the middle of the novel. Tom is an imaginative person. He lives by what he reads in books. Unlike Huck, Tom is raised by a good family and lives a fairly normal life. Tom and Huck are best friends. They first started out by playing bandits and pirates and having little adventures. They always talked about having adventures and killing people. This talk just shows us how Tom thinks Huck just catches on to what Tom says which shows tom as a leader and Huck just does as he says. This idea will remain the same till the end of the book. The only thing that will change is that Huck grows up wiser and older but still doesn’t grow out of doing as Tom says.

By the middle of the novel Twain introduces Jim but not just as Jim because he has already done that but he introduces him as Huck’s father figure. Even though jim is a black slave living in the South during slavery, Huck still looks at him as a father figure because Huck never had a living father and what Jim says and how he acts really makes more of an adult than any other character in the novel.