Huck Finn Man's Inhumanity Towards Man

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the few novels of his time that actually tried to protest the wrongs that where happening. The main theme of Huckleberry Finn is “man’s inhumanity toward man”. Throughout the whole book though twain used satire, which pokes fun at the crimes of others in an attempt to help society see the wrongs that it has and fix them. Many of the immoralities stated in the book had either happened to Twain or he was a witness to them in his own time. His life experiences proved him with everything he needed to show the corruption in the southern society in the 19th century. Mark Twain chose each one of his characters to show an evil, Huck Finn, Pap Finn, and the Grangerfords and the Shepherdson’s.

Huck Finn was an uneducated, powerless, uncultured, twelve year old boy. Huck was a white boy who was friends with a black boy named Jim.

Many times Huck had lied for Jim or another black man. In Chapter XVI while slave catchers where looking for a runaway slave on hucks rat they asked if it was a black man and hucks response was no it was a white who was suffering from small-pox. Twain attempted to use Huck to denounce social norms. Twain tried to show that Hucks innocence is what we all needed to have when approaching these types of problems. Twain gave Huck the option of following the social norm and denouncing Jim in Chapter XVI but instead he chose to save him from the bondage at the Phelps home.
Pap Finn was a rude, drunk, and brutal man. Twain created Pap Finn after an incident that happened to him, on the “Pennsylvania”. Pap Finn is based off of Mister Brown, the steamboat pilot from “Pennsylvania”. Pap Finn was put in the book to show that not all whites where apart of the aristocracy. Pap was always attempting to hid from the law, he sometimes left huck a lot and doesn’t return for almost a year. When he does return he attempts to kill hucks for the money he had received at the end of Tom Sawyer. Pap Finn was the evil of greed, which in the end got him killed while he went into an old abandoned ship and got shot in the head, and died on that very ship. Twain managed to use satire through Pap Finn to show that that kind of brutality was frequent in the 19th century.
The Grangerfords and the Shepherdson’s, displayed Twains hate concerning human cruelty.

Twain used the Grangerfords and Shepherdson’s to reproduce the scenes he used to see occur on the Quarles and Hannibal farms during his childhood. Twain believed that innocent people died for nothing. Twain uses Buck Grangerfords to show this because following buck killing Harney Shepherdson huck asked “did you want to hill him buck? Well I bet I did. What did he do to you? Him? He never done nothing to me. Well what did you want to kill him for? Why nothing-only its on account of the feud.” Twain used buck to show that just because of some silly petty arguments many kids and wives and husbands where killed over something that could have been resolved with just words, or compromise. Twain tried his hardest to ridicule the aristocrats of that time. The fact that a “romeo and Juliet” happened between a Shepherdson and a Grangerfords, which would seem to be ordinary, led to a complete massacre of both families. In addition buck said that this had happened many time before and it was going to keep

happening.
Mark twain accomplished in his endeavor to denounce human cruelty and brutaility. He didnt stop and the southern aristocrats who relied on their rifles to settle and feued, they may have been his first targets of his satire but not his last. Mark twain used people like Pap Finn and the three gang men, where denounced too.