Preview

Huckleberry Finn Civilized Analysis

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
382 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Huckleberry Finn Civilized Analysis
The themes of society and of being civilized are ever-present in Mark Twains “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Taking place in the late 1830s, positions concerning social structure and political correctness are in stark contrast to those held today. With this in mind, it makes it difficult to determine which character would be considered the most “civilized”.
By today’s social standards, being civilized means treating those around you with respect regardless of race, gender, or religion. By these standards, the most civil characters in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” would be Huck and Jim. However, if one were to base such a question on the acceptable social conduct of the 1830s, with its fixed social structure and racial hierarchy,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Huck and Jim, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn portray the theme of freedom throughout the story. Huck and Jim end up meeting each other afterwards both have ran from home, to be free. Huck has run away from home after faking his death to his drunken father. Huck didn’t want to stay longer with his father as it would go downhill for him, as he will get beat or even killed. Jim had become a runaway slave as he ran for his freedom. Jim ran due to him knowing he would have been sold and wouldn’t have seen his family, but instead runs to gain money and buy back his family.…

    • 196 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of the seemingly racist ideas expressed by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In some cases, the novel has been banned by public school systems and even censored by public libraries. Along with the excessive use of the word, "nigger," the basis for this blatant censorship has been the portrayal of one of the main characters in Huck Finn, Jim, a black slave who runs away from his owner, Miss Watson. At several points in the novel, Jim's character is described to the reader, and some people have looked upon the presented characterization as racist. However, before one begins to censor a novel it important to distinguish the ideas of the author from the ideas of his characters. It is also important to read carefully to sufficiently capture the underlying themes of a novel. If one were to do this in relation to Huck Finn, one would, without a doubt, realize that it is not racist and is, in fact, anti-slavery.…

    • 755 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mark Twain wrote the renowned nineteenth century novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a humorist, with intentions solely entertain the reader. Although the author warns at the start of the book, “persons attempting to find a moral in this narrative will be banished”, he submerses the reader into Southern society to evaluate their values (Notice). Satirists seek to find motives behind people’s actions and by dramatizing the contrast between appearance and reality; they strive to aware readers of the unpleasant truths within society. With both satire and irony, Twain exposes the selfish qualities of Southern society and their unreligious morals through his realist perspective.…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain tells a story which occurs in an American society prior to the civil war, a time period where discrimination against a person of African descent was extensive and acknowledged. The motif of true integrity versus what society defines as ethical appears frequently in the book. Accompanying the main protagonist, Huckleberry on his adventures, the reader is to understand how the motif is viewed through the eyes of a developing child and the citizens around him. Over the course of the novel, the author uses juxtaposition to underline the theme of slavery in the book; focusing on how it is seen by various Caucasian American characters.…

    • 1014 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "It is not what an author says, but what he or she whispers, that is important."…

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Author Henry James has said that "it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” For over one hundred years slavery had crippled the African American people and aided the white man; however, when the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect it would become a slow catalyst of change that would take over a century for the Civil Rights Movement to be at its pinnacle. Racial limits would be pushed, lasting tension would arise. A great American novel of this time should depict the questionable change in racial demographics of the United States. Set before African American freedom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain has been incessantly praised by authors and critics of all levels for pushing boundaries. It needs to be placed “in the context first of other American novels and then of world literature” (Smiley 1). Much like the American way of leaving the old country behind and immigrating to the United States, the novel’s loveable, young country boy of a narrator, Huckleberry Finn, pulls in readers of all kinds and feels the loneliness of being on his own travelling in the south, save for his runaway slave friend Jim. Along their adventures up and down the Mississippi River to free Jim, the reader follows Huck’s moral development, which is built up during different episodes in the story, but ultimately undone in the end. Although the “roundabout” nature of the end of the novel and Huck’s moral regression has rendered distaste, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deserves its place in the literary canon of American literature for its variable structure, good-natured narrator, and reflections of Antebellum America.…

    • 3904 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In spite of the fact that there are still a few discernable hints of clear prejudice in the novel by Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the creator utilizes portrayal to pass on an abolitionist servitude message. A standout amongst the best ways Twain does this is by making Jim, a character who is a gotten away slave and who at first appears to exemplify a considerable lot of the generalizations of slaves or African-Americans amid this period, for example, the inclination to be superstitious and submissive to the solicitations of whites, in spite of the reality he has gotten away. As this character examination of Jim in Huck Finn recommends, by speaking to Jim as a standout amongst the most solid, slightest misleading, most legitimate and minding characters in the content, this novel creates an impression about the lip service of the establishment of servitude and about the whites who bolster the foundation.…

    • 1054 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Despite being a literary genius of his time, Mark Twain was also an avid social critic. He observed a society filled with arrogant racial hypocrisy, and in the period between 1876 and 1883, during which Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, American society had two separate and contradictory belief systems. The official system preached freedom and equality between all men, and the unofficial stated the direct opposite. This tangible system was a dichotomy which divided the population into two social subgroups: the civilized which are the white people, and the savages the African Americans. Twain, who vigorously opposed this closed- minded and hypocritical mindset, incorporated his own opinion…

    • 1108 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is an American masterpiece. Contrary to The Algerine Captive Mark Twain‘s satire and irony is emphasized through the style and the use of the American “vernacular” dialect for the first time as well as the use of the African-American dialect. Therefore Huckleberry Finn remains the work that elevates this onetime rustic humorist into the ranks of literary genius. It is considered by Satirist Dick Gregory once said that Twain “was so far ahead of his time that he shouldn’t even be talked about on the same day as other people Huckleberry Finn is considered as the first American Novel and aimed at forging an American identity independent from the European one. The Novel, hence, satirize the paradoxical issues of slavery and the hypocrisy of the society as well as the deep intuitions of America.…

    • 1160 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mark twain is one of the best writers to use satire in his novels. In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the author puts in a lot of angry and bemused satire. In this essay I will tell you some bemused satires and angry satire that the author uses. I will also tell you what I think it means.…

    • 434 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain worded, “Just because you’re taught that some things are right and everyone believes it is right, it don’t make it right.” This stood out in a couple main parts of the novel. And those being when Huck starts realizing that Jim is a real person and just because the color of his skin is different doesn’t make him any different. Another being Huck's father, Pap, he is a prime example of racism, Pap is a drunken, abusive, racist old man. And lastly is when Pap expresses his feelings on the way a state lets black educated people vote which causes Pap to say “I will never vote again.” These are the main important examples of the theme slavery and racism. Throughout this paper you will read about how Huck realizes…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn is a blatant concoction of religious bias and varied notions on the role of religion. Satirical characters and the obvious use of sarcastic ideals in regards to the religious situations within the novel allowed Twain to address the issue on so many different levels. Huckleberry Finn is introduced, as being a religious character, as he looks to pray and reflect on virtues of right and wrong as dictated by those religious beliefs for which he has been taught. However, on many different levels he acknowledges a lack of belief in a greater being. Huck's faith quandary was introduced early in the novel as he reflects on the situation when "She took me in the closet and…

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    One of the main moral issues in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the issue of slavery and racism in the pre-Reconstruction South. We as a society now know that slavery was one of the grossest wrongs every committed against humanity in this country. The abuse and degradation of other human beings due to skin tone is inherently wrong. But Huckleberry Finn was raised in a society that taught him from birth that slavery was the natural course of life, and that were no moral issues with slavery at all. In Huck Finn’s mind, at least before any of his lasting steps of moral development, blacks were automatically subservient to whites; they should not be given any rights as humans, because in his mind, slaves were not humans at all. However, for much of Huck’s journey with Jim, we see that Jim’s relationship to Huck is influencing him morally, on that same issue to which Huck was basically brainwashed to believe was “normal”. However, ultimately, Huck does not confront the issue of slavery, and while he developed slightly in terms of his views of right and wrong, he did not at all change his opinions of the practice, and in the end was unchanged. Therefore, the modern reader should, under no circumstances, be satisfied with Huck’s ethical progression, as his opinion on the most significant moral issue in the book remained unchanged.…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the books, The Adventures Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, the authors demonstrate several themes: the coexistence of good and evil, the importance of moral education, the existence of social inequality, racism and slavery, intellectual and moral education, and the hypocrisy of “civilized” society. The common themes throughout the two books depict; that although the settings are nearly a century apart, society has not changed as drastically as believed.…

    • 1675 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Charles walks down the halls at his school hanging his head in a desperate attempt to be left alone rather than picked on; because of his glasses and lack of muscle tone he has been forced into the classification of a nerd and as such is outcast from the ‘popular’ crowd. Because of his alienation, Charles is able to see the moral flaws of the ‘populars’ when he himself upholds the values they parade. The same circumstance is true for the character Jim in Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because of the color of his skin Jim is an outcast; but his social exile that reveals the corruption of white society. Jim’s alienation from society reveals the poor moral codes and misguided assumptions of white society along with providing insight into this hypocritical system.…

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays