The character Huck Finn, portrayed in the classic novel Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, is a fun loving and adventurous young man.
Only Mr. Twain knows his exact age, as it is never mentioned once in the novel. We can only guess that he is in his early teens. Mr. Twain also does not give an accurate description of Huck in the book either.
Judging from the many things that he does, you can tell that he is neither a muscular person nor a skimpy weakling. He has the physique of a run of the mill country farm boy. The narration of this novel is very interesting. I liked how they reproduced the southern vernacular in its true form. “En wid I fetch’ her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin.
pg156″, although it is very hard to understand, it adds to the overall experience of reading this book. This book is also narrated from Huckleberry Finns point of view. This makes the book more interesting at times because you actually can tell what Huck is thinking during given situations. He is also a very literal narrator, He tells everything as accurately as he can and never really exaggerates the situations to any remarkably big extent.
This is also a very humorous book and Huck, being very literal minded, has no sense of humor. He doesn’t get the punch lines to jokes or funny situations”when the drunk man was riding a horse, he thought that he was not really an acrobat. ” Also, he took the age old joke about where mosses was when the lights went out seriously. This also makes him such an enjoyable character and makes the book so enjoyable to read. Just that at times he can seem like an idiot, like when he really belived, for quite a while, that genies existed and that he could rub a lamp and get his wishes granted.
I like this narration style because it really helps you to get to know Huck from his internal actions and reactions. It’s hard to tell a lot about a character by how he talks sometimes, that’s why I prefer this narration style to others. It seems that Huck has a very strange personality. I would describe his personality as “free”. He does everything he wants and nothing seems to stand in his way for long.
He definitely wouldn’t be considered a “proper” young man by today’s standards. For instance, he prefers to wear tattered, loose fitting, rags to nice clean cloths. I guess it goes along with his personality. He also prefers to eat differently than we would. He likes all of his food to be mixed up in one pot, compared to the “normal” way of eating with different dishes and food on separate areas of our plates. I would consider Huck to be more of an outdoorsman.
He loves to be outside with nature and doesn’t like to be indoors that much. In fact, in the book he is never really inside on his own free will. He would rather be outside on his adventures. He likes the simpler way of life.
Huck’s personality is also very adaptable. He is a country boy at heart but adapted to the high class living of the Widow. He can then quickly adapt to living in the woods with Pap, or on a raft with Jim. He could even adapt to living with the Grangerfords. He seems to act very natural during these different situations.
This helps him function and interact with others more easily. At times Huck doesn’t show very good common sense or compassion. Like when he teased Jim when he was locked up in a cell. They would give him a ladder to escape, but he was in a one-story cell.
Then they would give him chains because if he was jailed up he should be in chains. They also gave him pieces of metal to make into saws to cut himself out. They could have just given him a saw! We were not required to read these chapters because they did not fit in the book at all and were just a waste of space because it didn’t accurately portray Hucks personality. Huck would not have left him in there for so long.
Many critics of this book have also said that these, and other, chapters have no place in this book. He did show compassion many times in the novel though. Mostly towards the end. Like how the king and the duke try to swindle the wilkes money and he steals it and then gives it back.
He also could have just kept the money and bought him a lot of nice things, but he mostly knows right from wrong, and taking their money was not right in hucks eyes. As I was reading Huckleberry Finn since we received the book, I have come across many feelings about this character. liked some of what I read and I didn’t like many other parts. I felt that Mark Twain didn’t keep things consistent enough. This book is a good book, but clearly could have been a lot better.
I didn’t like the way Huck behaved during a few chapters of the novel. They sometimes made absolute no sense and didn’t fit in with the novel. They could have easily have been left out of the book and it still would have been a classic. They way Huck behaved in the aforementioned paragraph was clearly not thought out the way the rest of the book was. Huck is one of America’s favorite fictional characters and I can see why, for most of the book. Overall, Huckleberry Finn is a superbly written character.
Despite how simple minded he may seem, he has a few qualities that are lacking in modern books, and from books of the time. He is the main reason that this book is such an enjoyable experience to read, and I’m sure that it will be loved for many years to come.
