Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Most Prominent Theme
The most prominent theme in Huck Finn is Racism. This is shown when Twain says "Miss. Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox. and he used to do magic with it" (17). This shows that the whites don't think of blacks as people, by saying that they own them instead of a nicer term like "working for them". Even though they did technically own them since it was the slave times. Since then slavery has been banned, enslaving a person because they have a different color skin is extremely racist. This is also shown when Twain said "It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterward neither" (86). This shows that people in those days expected that when a "colored" person was around, they should be the lower person, and the whites should be in charge, and never have to apologize, which is extremely racist. I am proud of Huck for being a strong enough person to admit that he was wrong, that was incredibly hard in those days with all of the racial tension.
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I like how you included the river as being a metaphor for freedom. The theme most definitely is freedom, because we see so many examples of it throughout the book. You left out the part about Jim though, and I think his desire for freedom is an important factor that contributes to the theme as well; especially when Huck is thinking about telling on him, after all the talk that Jim is planning what he is going to do when he is free, at the time the two are drifting towards Cairo.
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