EN 210
Adventures of Huckleberry Fin: Essay Question
Living in a Persuasive Society “After all this long journey ... here it was all come to nothing, every thing all busted up and ruined” (Twain 233). In Mark Twain’s American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist who has grown noticeably in maturity, humility, and leadership, instantly takes an abrupt halt and regresses to his submissive, gullible, and ignorant ways at the end of the novel. This new realization leads the audience towards feeling cheated and unsatisfied in how they’ve invested their emotions and concerns into Huck and his journey. The entire journey of Jim and Huck reflects values and moral standards dealing with slavery before and during the …show more content…
After comparing Mark Twain and Huck’s situations and decisions, it seems as if their journeys mirror one another. As Twain leaves his home and begins to attain these liberal thoughts against racism and becomes an abolitionist, he starts to write the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This gives us the hope that this book is going to directly target an ending to slavery. But instead as Huck goes back to not speaking his own opinions and thinking for himself. Leo Mark best describes it as, “In the end, Huck regresses to the subordinate role in which he had first appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Most of those traits which made him so appealing a hero now disappear” (Marx 285). In the same way, we believe that Mark Twain in his own life will stand up for what he believes in at the height of the controversy of racism. But as he gains all this knowledge of abolition and begins writing the novel, he remains quiet, sometimes stops writing the book for a while, and doesn’t publish it until 20 years after the Civil War. As a result, in and outside the novel, people feel let down and cheated that nothing is truly fought