The Adventures of Huck Finn and Related Material

The radical novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain is an exceptional perception of the life of a boy, Huck, and a black slave, Jim, in the Post American Civil War in the Southern Society. It explores the ideas of slavery, inner discrepancies within ones self and the idea of nature and its ability to provide the means of escape and freedom and safety for a person. Through various devices of highly descriptive language, satire and symbolism of the Mississippi river the reader is able to comprehend sympathy towards both characters and to rienforce the idea of equality. In relation to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the two texts, This is the Sea by The Waterboys (Ensign records 1985) a song about the challenges of life and the difficulties that are to be over come to achieve the happiness you desire, and the poem The Journey of the Magi written by Thomas Sterns Eliot which is a poem about what life is really about Birth or Death and through this we are able to see life through a different perspective. We are confronted with the different levels of the idea of the human conditon through all of these texts and the modern reader is challenged to see the world through a new light and evaluate their understaniding of right and worng. Therefore these texts shed a new light on the different aspects of life from the twentieth century times to now tims in the twentfirst century and how times have changed for the better of humaity.

The prejudice of slavery is one of the most significant targets of Mark Twain’s satire and the Mississippi River is an important structural and symbolic tool used by Twain to exercise this issue. In the literal sense, the Mississippi river is a means of travel, but it also used as a symbol of freedom for our two main characters, Huck and Jim. For Jim it represents freedom from slavery and the enforced separation from his family. For Huck it represents freedom from the boundaries of civilisation and the hypocrisies of the...