The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Since its discovery by Europeans of different creeds, America featured in common imagination as the land of opportunity, leading to a mass migration from the ‘mainland’ to the uncharted frontier. In Mark Train’s antebellum tale titled “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, a youth tells his story from a first-person perspective, giving the reader a glimpse into the kind of world he lived in. The rapid spread and settlement of immigrants brought with it threats, such as the incapacity of the rule of law, as depicted when the titular character faked his own death by shedding a hog’s blood in his abusive, alcoholic father’s house, making him believe he fell victim to bandits (Spencer 127). Forcefully living with his abusive alcoholic father is another display of lawlessness, as no existing structures existed to protect the young man from paternal abuse.

Several other implications arose from the rapid growth and change during the era, such as elitism and social discrimination. While his family and friends were attempting to locate his corpse, which they assumed was in the Mississippi, Huck commends the higher quality of bread that he fished out from the river compared to what they had at home, saying “It was “baker’s bread” -what the quality eat; none of your low-down corn-pone” (Twain 47).  Discrimination went a large leap further in the practice of slavery, brought to life by the character Jim, who escaped resale by his caustic mistress Miss Watson. “I hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’ want to, but she could git eight hund’d dollars for me, en it ‘uz sich a big stack o’ money she couldn’ resis’” (Twain 45). In these and many other ways, the theme of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” not only reports on the social problems facing a young American nation but also the impact that the key issues of white privilege and slavery had on people at the time.

Works Cited

Spencer, Andrew. "“A Fiction of Law and Custom”: Mark Twain's Interrogation of White Privilege in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."The Mark Twain Annual 15.1 (2017): 126-144.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Sheba Blake Publishing. 2017.