Religion guides the human race. For thousands of years people have followed different sorts of religion. From the well known Atheism, Christianity, Satanism, and Judaism; to the bizarre Pastafarianism, Jediism, and Vampirism. Superstition has been around for millennia and has instilled a deep fear of ridiculous objects into cultures around the world. Both Religion and Superstition involve faith in the unknown, Mark Twain makes superstition a form of religion in his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is a very superstitious boy. Not believing the Widow or Mrs. Watson when he does not obtain what he wants from prayer he resorts to superstition. Like in many other religions offerings are required in order for the gods …show more content…
Jim tells Huck a list of superstitions are all action to not do. “ And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are going to cook for dinner, because that would bring bad luck. The same if you shake the tablecloth after sundown. And he said if a man owned a beehive and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sunup next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die” (Twain 52). Jim lists a few actions that would bring a person nothing but bad luck, and that luck would result in bad events happening to the person. Much like with Buddhist reincarnation, the more good deeds that a person does in a lifetime, they will come back as something better than they were in the previous life. However, sometimes the consequences the Gods instill give them a bad reputation. Mark Twain says, “All gods are better than their reputation” (Popova 1). Even though religion imparts harsh punishment to those who break the laws, people often overlook the positives and focus on the negatives. Such as with Christianity and Buddhism, once a person has either taken Christ in their heart or done enough good deeds throughout lifetimes heavens gates will open for them. The followers cling to their religions similar to how Huck clings to his
Huck Finn does not fully understand religion. The widow tells him he can ask God for whatever he wants so he thinks of religion as asking God for specific items. Religion is actually a more spiritual concept, and Huck is not mature enough to realize this. This is apparent when he mentions “Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way.” This tells us that Huck is very confused about religion and takes things very literally. Huck was not brought up in church, so he knows little about God and religion. Another time when Huck took something too literally was when he went to Tom Sawyer's group to "rob and murder" people. Huck fully expected there to be real elephants and “A-rabs” at their destination. Tom Sawyer just wanted to pretend this was the case, when Huck actually was preparing himself to see elephants.
Many people see Huckleberry Finn as a mischievous boy who is a bad influence to others. Society refuses to accept Huck as he is and isn’t going to change its opinions about him until he is reformed and civilized. The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson try to "sivilize" Huck by making him stop all of his habits such as smoking, etc. They try to reverse all of his teaching from the first twelve years of his life and force him to become their stereotypical good boy. The rest of the town also refused to view him as good and he was considered undesirable. The only time that the town's people are able to put away their views of Huck was when there was excitement to be found, like when they all crowded on the steamboat to see if the cannons can bring Huck's body to the surface. Everyone got interested in him and tried to show that they cared about him, but this is only after he is presumed dead. They take on these views to follow society in its ignorance. Few of them would have cared about Huck before because they didn't know him and didn't want to know him, but since taking interest in mysteries was the popular thing to do, society did it.
The book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tell the tale of a young boy who embarks on an adventure, one that leads him to find himself. Throughout the novel Huck develops a sense of morality that was always there to begin with, but not nearly as developed as it is by the end of the novel. Through living on his own, independent of societal and peer pressures, Huck is able to identify his own morals in defining what is 'right ' or 'wrong '.
Huckleberry Finn, “Huck”, over the course of the novel, was faced with many obstacles that went into creating his moral compass. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with Huck, a 12 year old boy heavily swayed by society and by Tom Sawyer, a fellow orphan. His opinions and depiction of right and wrong were so swindled to fit into society’s mold. Throughout the story Huck Finn’s moral compass undergoes a complete transformation in search of a new purpose in life. Huck was raised with very little guidance from an alcoholic father, of no mentorship. He was forced to live with Widow Douglas and with Miss Watson’s hypocritical values. Upon learning of God and Heaven from Widow Douglas, he remarks that he is unable to see the benefits of going
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, written by Samuel Clemens, is a novel that challenges the views of society and questions life through the eyes of an adolescent boy. By sprinkling traces of spirituality and religious views throughout the story, Clemens creates a "martyr-like" profile for his lead character Huckleberry Finn. Huck uses his religious views as his own conscience and challenges the status quo rules of his pious society to make his own decisions which leads him on a path to personal growth.
During the earlier stages of the novel, Huckleberry Finn was a very mischievous, troubled young boy and held a grudge against “sivilized society.” This was distinguishable in the very first page of the novel: “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was roug...
Huck Finn is a young boy deciding which morals to hold true. The quest for
According to Laurence Sterne, “Nobody, but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it is to have a man’s mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strength, but obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time”. In Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the character Huckleberry Finn, also known as Huck, is one who can conceive this plague. Huck Finn’s ‘two projects of equal strength’ was the difficult decision whether to turn Jim, a black slave, over to his rightful “property” owner or to continue helping Jim escape to freedom. This inner conflict took place in Jim’s conscience of trying to decide what the right thing to do was. These two conflicting forces were the basis of how the story was told. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is told from Huck’s viewpoint, and it illuminated the quandary that Huck faces as he befriends Jim and helps him to freedom, as well as convincing himself talkimg himself into believing feeling . A part of Huck thought helping Jim was wrong because helping a black man escape to freedom was against society’s rules and went against everything that he had been taught and raised to believe. The other part of Huck saw Jim as a good person, a friend, and believed Jim should be free from slavery. It was a war between Huck’s conscience of not following society’s conventional laws and following his heart in what seemed right.
Huck derives from antbellum south in a time the basis for morality was given to whites once they were born. This was pretty much summed up in, "white is good, black is bad." This type of society was exremely norrow minded and ignorant which eventually made it a normal concept in which morality was based of of. One of the major places where this is seen is in church, where these ignorant morals were instilled in people of these churches which somehow was justified by religion, more specifially Christianity for timing purposes. This use of religion was highly hypocritical in that the means for justification contradicted many of the moral principles of the religion. "Love your neighbor" became "Love only your white neighbor." In fact they saw it as their duty and as a good deed to own blacks and pieces of property.
Twain’s skeptical take on religion can be elicited because superstition is a theme that both Huck and Jim bring up several times. Although both of these characters tend to be quite rational, they quickly become irrational when anything remotely superstitious happens to them. The role of superstition in this book is two-fold: First, it shows that Huck and Jim are child-like in spite of their otherwise extremely mature characters. Second, it serves to foreshadow the plot at several key junctions. For example, spilling salt leads to Pa returning for Huck, and later Jim gets bitten by a rattlesnake after Huck touches a snakeskin with his hands.
Mark Twain shows his personal beliefs on religion by using Huck and Jim. Twain obviously feels that religion is useless and ineffective, and the character Huck feels the same way in the novel. As widow Douglas tries to “transform” huck into a proper church-going young boy, he completely looses his interest in Christianity. He feels that it has no way to prove its self. While he is still living with widow Douglas, he tells the reader that, “Then miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray everyday, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so”(Twain 8). Here Huck thinks of miss Watson to be a wonderful christian, but yet her theory on prayer does not work. He finds this “prayer” to be of no effect to him other than a waste of time. In the novel he tells the reader that miss Watson took out her Bible and read about Moses, he tells us:
In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain a young boy by the name of Huckleberry Finn learns what life is like growing up in Missouri. The story follows young Huckleberry as he floats down the Mississippi River on his raft. On his journey he is accompanied by his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Throughout this novel Huckleberry Finn is influenced by a number of people he meets along the way. Huckleberry Finn was brought up in an interesting household. His father was rarely ever home and if he was, he was drunk, his mother had passed away so Huck had no one to really look out for him or take care of him. Huckleberry had the life that many teenagers dream of, no parents to watch you or tell you what to do, but when Huckleberry finds himself in the care of Widow Douglas and Miss Watson things start to drastically change. Widow Douglas and Miss Watson are two relatively old women and think that raising a child means turning him into an adult. In order for Huckleberry to become a young man, he was required to attend school, religion was forced upon him, and a behavior that was highly unlike Huck became what was expected of him by the older ladies. Not to long after moving in, Huckleberry ran away. When he finally came home he respected the ladies wishes and did what they wanted, but was never happy with it. When Tom Sawyer enters the picture, he is the immediate apple of Huckleberry's eye. Huckleberry sees Tom as the person that he used to be and was envious of Tom's life. Huckleberry saw freedom and adventure in this young man and soon became very close friends with him. Huck then joins Tom's little "group" to feel that sense of belonging and adventure that he misses out on due to living with the two older ladies. Soon enough Huck realizes that all of Tom's stories are a little exagerated and that his promises of adventure really are not that adventurous. Tom gives Huckleberry a false sense of excitement and eventually Huck leaves Tom's gang. Later on Huckleberry 's father, Pap, enters the story and tries to change everything about Huckleberry that the two women have taught him.
The people and places exemplified throughout the work of Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn are widely influenced by both their encouraging and degrading views of religion, specifically Christianity. The perceptions and lifestyles of all of the characters in Huck Finn have some sort of relation back to their personal beliefs. Throughout American History, Christianity has made the largest impact on how people live their lives. It, therefore, fits that a story rooted in American mannerisms and beliefs should rely heavily on the ideas put forth through religion. This idea is primarily presented when looking at Huck himself, Jim, and Huck’s religious influences in life: Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas.
Huck's views on, "right and wrong" opinions, views of slavery, and the tricks he plays all show the beliefs that Huck withheld in the early part of the book. Hucks opinion of religion shows his lack of concern for serious things. When lectured on heaven and hell (by which he refers to by the "good" and "bad" place), Huck quickly decides that he wants to go to the "bad" place. He finds no interest in singing and praying to God, while the "bad" place calls to him as he hears that his friend Tom Sawyer is going to the "bad" place. His views of praying also reflect his lack of serious involvement. While you're supposed to pray for spiritual gifts, Huck just doesn't understand and then prays for fishing line. Huck is upset him when he finds that there are no fishing hooks to go with his line (Pg. 14) and takes prayer as a so-so kind of deal until faced with anoth...
In the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist is faced with many moral dilemmas. Huckleberry Finn is barely an adolescent who is used to skipping school and horsing around with his friends. Regardless, he is forced to make decisions that no person should have to make, even though he is only a child. Huckleberry is an outstanding role model and a model of what a human being should represent. Even though Huck is surrounded by corruption and is led by examples that do not recognize right from wrong, he is still able to address nonconformity. He makes the most morally upstanding decisions while under stress and the disapproval of society. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a young boy who grows up without the leadership of a father to guide him as he struggles with decisions that heavily impact those around him. Huckleberry makes the conscious decision to help a runaway slave escape to his freedom. He struggles with this decision for an extremely l...