Survival in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In Civilization, Lance Morrow (1995) asserts that Mark TwainĘs Huckleberry Finn attacks a compendium of American issues, ōHuck Finn is one of the earliest and deepest texts on race and slavery on violence, on child abuse, alcoholism, class distinctions in America, hatred, hypocrisy, fraud, gaudily manifold stupidity, backwoods brainlessness, and lying in all its forms-creative, vicious and otherwise,ö (25). From this compendium of social ills, the unlikely hero of the novel, Huckleberry Finn, emerges. Huck must survive a variety of ordeals during his adventures in the novel. He suffers from a motherless childhood, an abusive alcoholic father, and an environment filled with racism, thievery, and liars of one sort of another. Huck uses a variety of survival strategies to endure this world, from passive resistance and escape to thievery and lying. However, HuckĘs biggest challenge of survival is moral rather than physical in nature. It is his survival over this moral challenge that makes him emerge as heroic.Huckleberry Finn is a motherless child who suffers from an abusive and alcoholic father, Pap. Pap is fond of stealing, lying, beating Huck, and exhibits a racist mentality. Huck is locked up in the cabin for long periods of time. Huck is young at this point, both physically and morally. His main survival strategy is passive resistance. He takes his beatings and keeps his mouth shut, silently enduring his torment while he awaits a chance to escape. By faking his
. . .
you get a chance, because if you donĘt want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ainĘt forgot. I never see pap when he didnĘt want the chicken for himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway,ö (Twain 1999).
Huck also survives by taking advantage of lying and the undesirable traits to be found in human nature. He lies about his kidnapping, he lies to save Jim, and he takes advantage of the less honorable aspects of human nature when he keeps others from coming onto the boat by saying his father is dying of a contagious illness. Huck does not feel good about having to adopt such survival strategies, but he is beginning to evolve a strong moral sense of right and wrong. He understands that lying and stealing are viewed poorly in the eyes of the morality held by society at large and people like the Widow Douglas. However, he also understands it is more wrong to allow for certain behaviors to occur, like murder and the abuses of slavery. When Huck was pretending to rob jewels with Tom Sawyer and pretending to raid pirates, his moral development went unchallenged. As Eric Link (2000) writes, ōWith these essentially innocuous boyhood pranks, neither Huck nor Tom faces any significant moral dil
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Eventually Huck, Huck Jim, Huckleberry Finn, Eric Link, Douglas Huck, Pap Pap, Widow Douglas, Band Robbers, Perkins Perkins, twain 1999, Tom Sawyer, moral code, huckleberry finn, widow douglas, moral development, twain 1999 huckĘs, survival strategies, 1999 huckĘs, abusive alcoholic father, similar slave, alcoholic father, survival moral, own moral code, adopts moral code,
Approximate Word count = 1358
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Survival in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
