| Adventurs Of Huck Fin Essay, Research Paper
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Summary of Events:
-Huck’s pap returns and kidnaps him
-Huck fakes his death and runs away
-He meets up with Jim
-A house floats by and they plunder it.
-Huck sneaks ashore in a woman’s dress to find out about the situation
-They set off down the river, and they have an adventure on a steam boat, get separated by fog, and a boat hits them.
-The Grangerfords take Huck in, and he escapes.
-They save the Duke and Dauphin
-The Duke and Dauphin put on a play, then pretend to be a dead man’s brothers, then sell Jim and get run out of town.
-Huck stays with Aunt Sally, and pretends to be Tom and Tom arrives and pretends to be Huck.
-They set Jim free, Tom’s way. Tom gets shot, the truth comes out and it turns out that Jim had already been freed, as well.
Major Characters:
Jim: Jim is an escaped slave that Huck meets up with after he breaks free of his father. They travel together, and they come to like each other very much.
Huck Finn: Huck is a liar, and a very uncivilized boy, but he is strangely endearing. He goes through a sort of metamorphosis through the book, and out grows his old way of thinking about slaves, and comes out of the shadow of his best friend, Tom Sawyer.
The Duke and Dauphin: Two men that Jim and Huck pick up along the river. They are nothing but stupid plot devices that Twain sued, when he realized that the book was going in a direction that wouldn’t sell very many novels. They are idiotic oafs, who will do anything to make a quick buck.
Personal Reaction:
I enjoyed Huck Finn a lot, but it had two very huge problems with it: the characters of the Duke and Dauphin and the ending when Tom and Huck are trying to break Jim out of jail.
I have no idea why Huck didn’t just push his majesty and the duke off the raft and let them drown in the river. They were whiny and mean and were very rude to good characters. The most unfortunate thing was that they were not characters I loved to hate. If I loved to hate a character, at least there’s some feelings. I just wanted Twain to write these two out. While Huck and Jim were adventuring down the river together, the book was very entertaining and I actually looked forward to reading it. I looked forward to finding out what would happen to them next. After the Duke and Dauphin came aboard, I just wanted the book to move on.
The second thing that irritated me was the end. I felt as if the entire book was building up to something, and then there was nothing. The main problem was the appearance of Tom Sawyer to “save the day”, but by then, Huck didn’t need Tom to save the day. His character had progressed enough that Huck could have saved the day all by himself. By bringing Tomes character into the book, Huck takes a leap backwards. He was reduced to the role of the dutiful sidekick to the childish Tom Sawyer. I believe the book would have ended better if Huck and Jim had continued down the Mississippi and followed the Gulf of Mexico around to Texas.
The very end also left me wondering, but not in a good way. Huck Finn made me very frustrated. I wanted to know what happened between Huck and Jim. I wanted to know how Jim felt about being free. I wanted to know if Huck and Jim were going to stick together. Id like to think that they will. However, the last quote of the book was very appropriate. “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally, she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can?t stand it. I been there before.” The last quote almost makes up for the poor ending. (Almost.)
At first, I had trouble with all the different dialects, but slowly I got used to them and began to enjoy the story a lot more.
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