Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Again, the author ridicules the ability of this collective predisposition toward compassion and mercy to go overboard when he refers to the village’s sentimental forgiveness of the wicked Injun Joe after his decease. Another form of hypocrisy is that the adults shun the kids who believe in superstition, but the kids are just following the examples the adults set. Religion could easily be superstitious (November 2013), and that is what the kids are mimicking, but the rest of society is scornful towards the superstitious children. The children believed so firmly in these superstitions, that it could almost be religious. “...he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the rain-water was" (75). The kids dipping their hands into stump water

to get rid of warts is like dipping your fingertips into holy water. Connections between religion and superstition are seen throughout this book.
On the other hand, Mark Twain also states very well in his book, that society and its members have some inherent goodness as well.

By depicting how hard townspeople work together to find Tom and Becky when they are lost in the cave, he lets the reader appreciate how valuable cooperative work is, and how every person’s contribution is worth listening to. The author narrates that “[…] before the horror was half hour old two hundred men were pouring down highroad and river toward the cave (and that) […] many women visited Aunt Polly and Mrs. Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They cried with them too.” (pg. 204). Characters such as Aunt Polly and Mrs. Douglas are noteworthy examples of the intrinsic kindness of man. The former repeatedly shows her pure goodness all throughout the novel when dealing with Tom Sawyer and his behavior. She not only takes care of an orphan child but also withstands all the difficulties that come along when trying to parent him. Likewise, Mrs. Douglas is eager to help Huckleberry Finn become an educated young man even before he becomes rich. As the story tells, her true love and care for him once keeps the widow haunting for Huckleberry everywhere “in great distress” (pg. 204) for forty-eight

hours.
Another interesting way that the author uses to illustrate the natural goodness in human beings is through Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn’s friendship. Unlike most people in the village, Tom does not judge Huck for who his father is, but instead, he focuses on Huckleberry himself and his uniqueness. Sawyer becomes his true friend and alibi, and they promise loyalty to each other beyond any situation. In a way, Tom represents the channel through which Huckleberry gets credibility in front of the judge and the community in the day of the trail, and how society starts to accept him little by little until they fully acknowledge the lad when he becomes under Widow Douglas protection. The author reminds his audience of the importance of friendship and how loyal and pure it is during childhood, different in every way to the convenience relationships most adults attempt to forge. In the end, Tom’s maturity and real interest in his friend guides him to advise Huck to do the right thing and to accept the changes human beings must go thru.
The protagonist throughout the novel recurrently exercises the use of language to manipulate others, and it represents another technique by means of which individuals’ selfishness and evil nature flourish.

Tom is an expert in convincing other boys and girls to do what he requests. The perfect example of this, and by which most people in the world know Tom, is the scene of the whitewash. “Tom swindles his friends out of all their favorite objects through a kind of false advertising when he sells them the opportunity to whitewash the fence” (July 2013), and he does it in such a skillful way that he turns his punishment into a ‘privileged opportunity not often handed to a boy’. His ambition grows stronger every weekend when he goes to church as hears, once and again, about the challenge to get a Doré Bible. For Sawyer, it is much easier to persuade his friends to trade their valuable tickets for other curious ‘treasures’, than to memorize those never-ending verses from the Scriptures. In the end, he gets his Bible, but the author makes sure to remark the fact that, due to his cunningness, Tom was ridiculed in front of everyone. In the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain succeeds to relate characteristics of his society, in the 1840s, to those of later times. He centers his ideas on major topics, but most of the time they revolve on the theme of human nature. The positive aspect of alluding to themes of this kind is that it allows the story to become timeless and never out-of-date.

What the author gains from his writing is being able to travel back and forward in time, to continue engaging his multiple-generations audience with a reading that not only makes them go back to their childhood, but also to help them reflect on those aspects of life where they have started to act just like that hypocritical society Twain makes so much fun of. The author calls out the reader’s inner nature and exposes it to a non-all-black-or-white reality, where human imperfection becomes tangible, and individuals’ goodness is scarce. Human nature “refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting that humans tend to have naturally, independently of the influence of culture” (June 2013). Throughout history, many philosophers and thinkers have analyzed this question of being human and acting like one, and even if they dissented at some extents, from the time of Adam and Eve there are vestiges of the influence of human nature in people’s actions. Whether for good or for bad, individuals seem to tend to a certain course of action, as if programmed in advance to proceed in a specific way. Tom Sawyer, for example, dragged into trouble due to his inherent evil humanity but other times moved into outstanding compassionate actions by his inner goodness. The author mirrors the question of human nature, a good but still evil and imperfect one, in every stretch of his writing letting the reader infer that not only during Twain’s childhood, men were victims of their inner nature, but also at the time he writes the novel, and that it seems probable to continue that way. Nevertheless, Mark Twain also makes clear, as the story progresses, that people should be willing to compel their nature so as it obeys to their inner goodness, rather than evil. Sawyer’s maturation has a lot to do with it. The author draws the reader’s attention by covertly asserting that “every man has a good nature but as well evil and imperfect nature” (August 2013) but despite this, he must seek to take the purest goodness out of it, just as Twain’s characters do by the end of the novel.