Huck finn 3
Huck finn 3In Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain develops the plot into Huck and Jim’s adventures along the Mississippi River. The two main characters, Huck and Jim, both run from social injustice and both are distrustful of the civilization around them. Huck is considered an uneducated uncivilized boy, constantly under pressure to conform to the humanized surroundings of society. Jim, a slave, is not even considered as a real person, but as property. These two characters grow both as individuals and together throughout the book. Their relationship becomes imperative to the plot of the story.
The first encounter of the two characters happens in chapter two, “Our Gang’s Dark Oath”. Huck sneaks out in the middle of the night to meet up with Tom Sawyer in order to convene with their “gang of robbers”. As they are sneaking away, they make enough noise to attract the attention of Jim, Miss Watson's black slave. He comes out of the kitchen to see what caused the noise, and sits down in the dark to wait for it to happen again, but quickly gets tired and falls asleep. As he falls asleep, Huck wants to leave and meet the rest of the gang so that they don’t get caught, but Tom insists on playing a trick on Jim. So he lifts Jim's hat from his head and hangs it on a nearby limb. Huck tells us that Jim later turned this incident into an elaborate tale of being visited by witches while he slept. At this point in the story, Huck doesn’t have feelings for Jim one way or the other. Huck just doesn’t care much for Jim and sees nothing wrong with the prank that has just been played by Tom.
After staying with his drunken and unreasonable father for a short period of time, Huck grows tired of his current living conditions and see no other way out of this rut, but to escape and runaway. Jim also has the notion to run away from Miss Watson because she is about to sell him and separate him from his wife and kids. Both characters take it upon themselves to sneak away to Jackson’s island, not knowing the other’s intention to do the same. After spending a few days on the island, they discover each other and after convincing Jim that Huck is not a ghost that has come back from the dead, Huck and Jim exchange stories of how they got there. This is important to both of them, because they both make a promise to each other that they will not tell anybody about their escapes. A normal white boy back in those times would have turned Jim in and collected the reward in a matter of seconds, but because Huck’s would have gotten caught himself, he promises not to tell Jim’s secret.
Without making it crystal clear to...
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