Huck's Contradiction in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Huck's Contradiction in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Huck was a boy

who thought very little of himself, but had a huge impact on others. His

moral standing was based on what is easier, right or wrong. He lived the

way he wanted to live, and no one told him otherwise. He had the

adventure of a lifetime, and yet he learned along the way. Although Huck

has certain beliefs about himself, his actions and decisions contradict

these beliefs.

Huck may consider himself lazy, but in reality, he is a very hard

worker. At one point, Huck wants to get away from his father so he comes

up with a scheme to fake his death and escape from his cabin: "I out with

my saw and went to work on that log again. I took the sack of corn meal

and took it to where the canoe was hid and shoved the vines and branches

apart and put it in. I had wore the ground a good deal, crawling out of

the hole and dragging out so many things. So I fixed that as good as I

could from the outside. Then I fixed the piece of log back into its place.

I took the ax and smashed in the door-I beat it and hacked it considerable,

a-doing it. I fetched the pig.and laid him down on the ground to bleed.

Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and bloodied the ax good, and

stuck it on the back side, and slung the ax in the corner" (24). If Huck

were lazy, he would not have gone through all that trouble to escape, if he

escaped at all. A lazy person would have just stayed there and not worried

about what happened. At another point in the novel, Huck and a runaway

slave, Jim, are on an island where th...

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...x, James M. From Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton University Press, 1966) "Southwestern Vernacular" pp. 167-184. Copyright @1966 by Princeton University Press. Rpt. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Ed. Claude M Simpson. Englewood Cliffs,N.J. 1968.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Phd. "Teaching Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", 1995, July Summer Teachers Institute, Hartford, Connecticut @1995

http://www.pbs.org/wgbn/cultureshorck/teachers/huck/essay.html

Leavis, F.R. "Three New Approaches to Huckleberry Finn". (London: Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1955) Rpt. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Ed. Claude M Simpson. Englewood Cliffs,N.J. 1968.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

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