Symbolism of The River & The Road in 2 Works

Huckleberry Finn begins with Huck in conflict with the Widow Douglas, who has taken him in as a border to reform him. When his drunken and abusive father shows up he follows him to escape the Widow, but then escapes from his father as well, killing a pig to make everybody think he is dead. He disappears from the area when he takes off down the river with the runaway slave Jim. Their journey down the river, which puts them in contact with a series of distinctive characters in ante-bellum America and which includes the recapture, escape (with the help of Tom Sawyer and Huck), recapture, and ultimate freeing of Jim from slavery, constitutes the main line of action in the story.

The importance of the Mississippi River as the controlling symbol of the pattern of ideas in Huckleberry Finn is argued forcefully by T.S. Eliot, who despite his association with British literature was in fact, like Twain, a native of Missouri (St. Louis). Eliot's familiarity with the Mississippi River is important to his

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attraction for Huck is that he begins to get an understanding of how bullies behave. He is initially morally confused by the fact that Tom "was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. . . . Here was a boy that was respectable, and well brung up. . . . It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so" (Clemens 184). Nor of course does Huck realize that Jim has already been freed. But of course Twain's real point is that the outrage is slavery itself and that in his innocence Huck is parroting received cultural wisdom about slavery. Meanwhile, Tom's plan is morally opaque because it involves Jim in a perilous encounter with the authorities. His idea is to raft downstream "and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him backup home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and . . . get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a . .. brass band" (228). It is as if Tom sees the cleansing potential of the drift downriver, but only in boyish fantasy. In fact, this fantasy is a plea for social justice, with the river the container of moral possibility in America, and with the content of that possibility n
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2706
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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