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, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is all but carefree, utilizing its adolescent narrator to subtly portray, analyze, and criticize society. At the most superficial level, Twain introduces a profusion of characters each with a distinctive personality and vignette of life in the South during the mid 19th century. Delving deeper, Finn provides a clear evaluation of bondage, from the perspective of Jim's flight from slavery to his own struggles with the oppressions of behavior, thought, and the freedoms he desires. On the faintest of thematic notes, Twain's scorn for Southern hypocrisy can be seen in Huck's contradictive moral struggles between Jim's freedom and Southern Christianity, which embraces equality of all who believe but endorses slavery at the same time.

Regarded by many as the great American epic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn surpasses other literary works of its time not only for its story and language, but for its carefully crafted characters as well. For instance,...