expository essay huckleberry finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essays

He came home (or a poor man’s nostos) maya holmes 11th grade, the adventures of huckleberry finn.

Nostos is a theme in Greek Literature where an epic hero returns home from sea after shipwrecks, adventures, and trials. When the hero returns home, the hardest part is retaining their identity. While Huck is not an epic greek hero, he does return...

Twain's Pre-Civil War America Anonymous

American authors tend to write about life in their times. Mark Twain lived in the 1800's and witnessed the Civil War era. At that time, our nation was divided over the issue of slavery. The inhumane treatment of slaves moved Twain to use his...

Censorship and Classics Anonymous

Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou. What do these writers have in common? Sure, they are all great American authors, but there is something else. They are all "banned." Censored. Forbidden. Who has not read a book by at least one...

An Examination of Religion in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Neil Khare

A hackneyed expression states that one should never discuss religion or politics in certain social settings. Religion has been, is, and always will be a topic of debate and disagreement. Literature is a major media in which religious sentiments...

Examination of Freedom as an Overall Theme in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Ryan Schremmer

"The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer,...

Twain's Women Kristine Mathewson

"American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male; Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate." Judith Fetterley (Walker, 171)

Story of the Afterlife Niles Kendrick

The afterlife, in accordance to the underworld, includes manifold mythological characters and symbols in the form of the river Styx, Cerberus, Charon, and Hades itself. The journey into the underworld begins with a person's death and journey for...

Huck's Roles as Defined by the River and the Shore Nathaniel Popper

Whenever Huck Finn steers his raft from the free currents of the river to the brambles on the banks of the Mississipi he renews his interaction with the society of the American south. When Twain's narrative comes ashore with Huck, the narrative...

Twain's Use of Dialect in a Case of Superstition Frances G. Tilney

"O, it's de dad-blame' witches, sah, en I wisht I was dead, I do. Dey's awluz at it, sah, en dey do mos' kill me, dey skyers me so. Please to don't tell nobody 'bout it, sah, er ole mars Silas he'll scole me; 'kase he say dey ain' no witches. I...

Huck Finn's Coming of Age Ryan Pifer

With his novel about a young adolescent's journeys and struggles with the trials and questions associated with Huck's maturation, Mark Twain examines societal standards and the influence of adults that one experiences during childhood. The...

A Collision of Conscience and Morality Anonymous

Huckleberry Finn is a young boy who struggles with complex issues such as empathy, guilt, fear, and morality in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are two different sides to Huck. One is the subordinate, easily influenced boy whom...

Political Propaganda: Huckleberry Finn and the Abolitionist Movement Jeanine Ancelet

"I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any...

Character Portrayals By Twain William Hudson

In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Mark Twain depicts various characters in the story according to his own moral and social beliefs. He portrays some characters as admirable or virtuous, and others as dislikeable or amoral. These portrayals...

Huckleberry Finn as a Picaresque Hero Jamee Pullins

Picaresque -- what a scary word. What can it mean? By definition, the word picaresque is an adjective, which describe a genre of prose fiction that depicts in realistic, often amusing detail about the adventures of a roguish hero of low social...

Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" as a Literary Response to Harriette Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Anonymous

When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after the Civil War, it was in part a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's pre-Civil War novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. While supporting many of Stowe's claims and motives, Twain also found fault...

Celebration of Freedom in Huckleberry Finn Sarah Simpler

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn so innocently reveals the potential nobility of human nature in its well-loved main characters that it could never successfully support anything so malicious as slavery. Huckleberry Finn and traveling companion Jim, a...

A Racial Revolution Anonymous

Written during a time in which racial inequality is the norm, and people of color are looked upon as lesser beings, Mark Twain, in his landmark novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pens a character in Jim who is the epitome of restrained...

Analysis: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Alice Hsieh

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain paints, through the southern drawl of an ignorant village boy, the story of America as it existed in the quickly receding era of his own childhood. While written about childhood adventures,...

Examining Huckleberry Finn through Thoreau's Theory of Morality Anonymous

"My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses, and hypocrisies," Mark Twain once reflected. Morality does not flourish in such a society, as illustrated by its rampant...

American Literature's Gilded Carriage: A Reasonable Basis for the Institution of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Required Reading Anonymous

Mark Twain's satiric masterwork The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, over time, manifested itself as a novel of pronounced controversy proportionate to its tremendous literary worth. The story of an "uncivilized" Southern boy and the intrigues...

I Spare Miss Watson's Jim Ming Vandenberg

"But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody" (Twain 95). As is epitomized by the preceding quote, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain one of the central conflicts is that of the...

The "Savage" as the Civilizer April Strickland

In studying the development of the early American novel, one might find it helpful to compare Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg in "Moby Dick" to Huck's relationship with Jim in "Huckleberry Finn". In each case, the "savage" actually humanizes...

A Reasonable Basis for the Institution of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Required Reading in High School Justin T. Cass

Mark Twain's masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has over time, created controversy proportionate to its tremendous literary worth. The story of an "uncivilized" Southern boy and a runaway slave traveling up the Mississippi River...

Realism and Romanticism in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Robin Bates

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." This witty aphorism, although intended as a commentary on society, also reveals some of Mark Twain's beliefs about literature. By asserting that fiction must stay in the realm of...

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Adventures of Huck Finn: Introduction

Adventures of huck finn: plot summary, adventures of huck finn: detailed summary & analysis, adventures of huck finn: themes, adventures of huck finn: quotes, adventures of huck finn: characters, adventures of huck finn: symbols, adventures of huck finn: literary devices, adventures of huck finn: quizzes, adventures of huck finn: theme wheel, brief biography of mark twain.

Historical Context of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Other books related to adventures of huckleberry finn.

• Full Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Where Written: Hartford, Connecticut, and Quarry Farm, located in Elmira, New York
• When Published: 1884 in England; 1885 in the United States of America
• Literary Period: Social realism (Reconstruction Era in United States)
• Genre: Children’s novel / satirical novel
• Setting: On and around the Mississippi River in the American South
• Climax: Jim is sold back into bondage by the duke and king
• Antagonist: Pap, the duke and king, society in general
• Point of View: First person limited, from Huck Finn’s perspective

Extra Credit for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Dialect. Mark Twain composed Huckleberry using not a high literary style but local dialects that he took great pains to reproduce with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.

Reception. A very important 20th-century novelist, Ernest Hemingway, considered Huckleberry Finn to be the best and most influential American novel ever written.

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Literature Notes
• Essay Questions
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at a Glance
• Book Summary
• About The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Notice; Explanatory
• Chapters 5-6
• Chapters 9-10
• Chapters 12-13
• Chapters 15-16
• Chapters 17-18
• Chapters 19-20
• Chapters 21-23
• Chapters 25-26
• Chapters 27-28
• Chapters 29-30
• Chapters 32-33
• Chapters 34-35
• Chapters 36-38
• Chapters 39-40
• Chapters 41-42
• Chapter the Last
• Character Analysis
• Huckleberry Finn
• Character Map
• Mark Twain Biography
• Critical Essays
• Freedom versus Civilization
• Characterization — Pap versus Jim
• Famous Quotes
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• Full Glossary
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• Cite this Literature Note

Study Help Essay Questions

1. Compare and contrast the characters of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

2. Discuss the characteristics of Jim and how or if he qualifies as a heroic figure.

3. Discuss Huck's struggle with his conscience and how or if he qualifies as a heroic figure.

4. Compare and contrast the environment on shore and the environment on the raft.

5. Discuss Huck's statement, "All right, then, I'll go to hell."

6. Discuss the use of satire in the novel and how Twain uses different types of humor for social commentary.

7. Discuss the theme of romanticism versus realism.

8. Discuss Twain's use of Huck Finn as the narrator and how Huck's literal voice impacts the novel.

9. Discuss Huck's view of religion, especially his idea of two types of Providence and the characters that represent each type.

10. Discuss the novel as a realistic portrayal of American racism before and after the Civil War.

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Expository Essay On The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn And Racism

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of a young boy’s adventures on the Mississippi River escaping the society and being “sivilized” by Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. The river is Huck’s freedom; the river represents the difference between nature and society. It is quiet and peaceful place where Huck is able to think; the river is a place to escape to. Huck’s first decision is to stay and be abused by his father or escape. I believe Huck did not want to stay but I also think he was craving an adventure of his own. Although Huck is uneducated, he is still clever, and he proves this when he fakes his own death.

He says to himself that Tom would be proud of his accomplishment, but then he diminishes this thought by saying Tom would have done it better. Throughout Huck and Jim’s journey, Huck makes up new identities to better the chances of freedom. Examples of these are the following: first he portrays a young girl and visits a home to get information of Jim and his successful getaway, and another is when he leads the men he meets to believe his father has smallpox. Huck faces a moral predicament of aiding a slave to freedom. He is unsure of the correct thing to do.

He knows that society thinks helping a slave is wrong, but he knows that he would feel worse if he turns Jim in when he had the chance. This is shown when Huck says to himself, “S”pose you”d done right and give Jim up; would you feel better than you do now? No, says I, I”d feel bad- (Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 69). Huck begins to views Jim as a real human being after he sees Jim talk so passionately about his family. Jim’s loyalty toward Huck is made aware when Jim is thrilled to see Huck again after they were separated in the fog.

Their friendship begins to show after Huck lies about having smallpox to avoid Jim being caught. Huck is forced to decide what is right and what is wrong when Jim is captured by the Phelps. When Huck says, “All right then, I”ll go to Hell,” and risks his soul to save Jim, it shows Huck’s natural heart and the growth from an immature boy to a young man (Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 162). Although Huck has matured throughout the novel, the end of the novel leaves Huck in the same place as he was in the beginning; he still wants to escape civilization and society.

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Criticism of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on The Basis of Racism

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December 10, 1884

Picaresque novel

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, Jim, Pap, Judith Loftus, The Grangerfords, The Duke, Doctor Robinson, Mary Jane, Joanna, Susan Wilks, Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps

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Critic’s Notebook

‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction

How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

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By A.O. Scott

One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.

“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.

The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?

Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”

Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .

As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.

“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.

Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .

“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.

I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.

As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.

“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.

That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)

One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.

Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”

In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.

For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.

Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.

James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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