Moral Inadequacies in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

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The book I am doing my book report on is called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain. This book revolves around a poor fourteen year old boy named Huck who runs away from his drunk father and finds friendship within a former slave, Jim, trying to escape to the free states. They adventure along the Mississippi River and end up stopping at various places throughout the novel and meet people who are all morally inadequate. “Tom told me what his plan was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it.” This quotes illustrates the dangers that come to Huck and Jim in this novel, but how Huck chooses to go with the plan anyhow, since it causes a sense of ‘adventure.’ The setting of this novel takes place before the Civil War in different towns along the Mississippi River in Missouri. I will talk about how Huck meets Jim, how he and Jim have to escape from their present issues, how they form a friendship and come across evil in their journey, and how they both end up free with a little help from Tom Sawyer.

The subject this book revolves around slavery, and how white folks’ mindset on black people was popular at that time. Their mindset involved treating black people as inferior to them, and how to them, they were not even considered human but property. Twain also shows how sometimes a fourteen year old boy (Huck) was more morally correct towards treatment of black people than many adults of his time. Twain presents this in a humorous way with its serious points. The issue is obvious throughout the story and makes the reader wonder how even “good” characters treate...

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... would recommend it to others because it is a good lesson filled with a lot of comic relief.

Overall, this book was silly, humorous, serious, tense, and funny in all the right ways. It accurately depicted American culture of the time, although sometimes it was a little over the top. This book was basically about a young teen named Huck, grown up in a very close-minded society, who learns and matures throughout a journey with a runaway slave with a big heart, and learns as a first hand experience (which is a better type of learning than teachers regurgitating biased information that may be inaccurate) of what he should truly feel and what his actual opinion of many things are. This book really helped me imagine what living in the late 1800s was like and how bad the issue of racism was, with a lot of comic relief and silly portrayal of white Americans at the time.

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