Huckleberry Finn Character Traits

Character Analysis in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, is a novel that tells the journey of a thirteen year old boy named Huckleberry Finn, who has encounters a great deal of adversity in his life. Huck’s mother passed away and his father was very violent and always drunk, forcing Huck to be cared after by Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. Later on in the novel Huck fabricated his death to escape his father’s violent abuse and fled up the Mississippi River, where he found Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave. Together, they teamed up and set out down the Mississippi River on a raft hoping to escape the grasp of the southern society. Characters develop and change as a story climbs towards

Three characters, Huckleberry Finn, Jim, and Tom Sawyer, showed the most signs of development throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and without the influences from other characters in the novel, none of them would have developed. Huckleberry Finn is the protagonist and the narrator of this novel who is the thirteen year old son of the local drunk of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Since Huck has no mother, and has an often absent/drunk father, he is forced to live with Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas who try to reform Huck into society’s norm. Huck finds a robber’s stash of gold and his father demands the money. When Huck refuses, his dad kidnaps him and abuses him trying to obtain the location of the gold, leading to Huck fabricating his own death to escape. Twain makes it very clear that Huckleberry Finn is a boy who comes

At the beginning of the novel, Jim is recognizable as a “comic stage Negro, a type who has trod the less reputable boards of the American theatre”(Hansen 1). However at “the beginning of Chapter XIV, we discover that Jim has a good deal of common sense when he complains to Huck of how dangerous it is to go looking for the sort of adventures to be found on the Walter Scott” (Hansen 2). When he starts influencing Huck, we see the father-figure coming out, providing Huck with something he has never had or experienced. Jim is a kind and gentle character who is capable of noble action seen where he sacrifices his own freedom in order to save Tom’s life (Hansen 6). He is also “sentimental family man” and this is shown when he grieves over the suffering of his own child after striking her for not doing what he said. (Hansen 5-6) Jim is partly the comic stage Negro, but he is also a clever, protective, and sentimental family man with the reasoning power, the dignity, and the nobility that belong to that natural man (Hansen