Huck Finn Essay, Research Paper

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is an excellent book. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I had anticipated. It was a great book on life of Huck Finn. The details and settings were outstanding. This was indeed a great novel.

The setting of this book was very important to me. It helped to back up how the characters acted. Being set in the 1830s, and in the south; the reader could really relate with how each character acted, talked, and what they thought of others. With the times in the setting and the places it was set helped a lot with understanding the story. The story would have never made sense if it had been in the north or even the Far West. The story was set, in my opinion, in the perfect place and time. It really helped the story come together. In some cases the setting could have been brought out a little more to help out with the descriptions and plots of the story, but in the long run, the setting was pretty much described enough.

The characters in Huck Finn were very believable. The way they acted and the way they thought made them seem almost real. To me, Huck stands out the most. He acts like a young boy who is trying to help out people in need of help like Jim. He was friendly, kind, and willing to stand up for what he believed in, good or bad. With the many characters in this book, a few helped bring out the story. The main character, Huckleberry Finn, was an adventurous boy who was kind, smart, and shrewd but, no matter where he went, he always got into trouble. Jim, who was a run away slave, was a very kind man. He is very smart and knowledgeable of natural surroundings, and has good common sense. Jim and Huck were best friends. Widow Douglas was the lady who took care of Huck. She was a sweet lady who tried to teach Huck how to be proper and civilized. Huck’s father was basically a town drunk who would beat Huck when he drank too much. Tom Sawyer was a very mischievous boy who could make any situation seem more exciting and complex than they really were. He and Huck were friends.

In the plot of this story, the situations seem to rise out of the setting that the particular event is at. Huck is beaten many times by his drunken father and decides to fake his murder and runs away to Jackson’s Island to hide from everyone. While on this island he meets Jim who was a run away slave. When Huck discovers that people are looking for Jim, the two of them ride down the Mississippi River in an earlier discovered raft. As they float down the river, they plan to go to the Ohio River and travel north to free states, states that don’t have slaves. On the way, a steamboat hits the raft and Jim is discovered and gets sold to Silas Phelps. Huck then goes to rescue Jim, pretending to be Tom Sawyer and gets into many ridiculous and fantastic plans. Later when Jim is captured again, the people find out that he was freed by his owner before she died. Jim is free and Huck leaves the civilized life and heads for a new territory.

The author uses many literary devices in this novel. One main one is the use of dialect. This was probably the most prevalent and noticeable device. When the dialogue speeds up, the dialect becomes very real. The dialect shows the level of society in a low class style of people. Jim also speaks in this manner. The author also uses conflict to show the problems when Jim is discovered and tried to escape, or when Huck is having a conflict of interest while living with Widow Douglas. One of the themes that I found was that planning out a situation is often the best thing to do. Huck had to think of a plan to help get away from his father and a plan to get Jim free again. Another theme is that helping someone is not sin. Huck helped Jim to escape and run away and he also helped Sophia Grangerford find her bible.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this book very much. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter his or her reading preference because the book is very believable. It’s seems like it could have been a true story. The beginning to the end could be mistaken for real life situations. The only thing about the book that I would have changed was that Huck would have stayed with Widow Douglas and they could have let Jim stay with them to live. But besides that I would have kept the book’s ending the same.