The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Criticism

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Freedom is the foundation of many ideas and progression in history. Those who acquire victory in a conflict usually will punish the other side by taking away their freedom, which creates a larger divide that can take years or even centuries to bridge and allow both sides to coexist equally. The losers of these battles are named minorities, while the victors are titled the majority. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn himself creates a conflict with society and civilization, and as such takes it upon himself to be free of society’s cold, firm grasp that he had become a part of. Huckleberry runs away on a wild adventure with his slave friend Jim, and together they run and encounter many twisted individuals on their way towards freedom, which ironically for Jim, was in the southern portion of the United States. Mark Twain etches every thought and feeling either of these individuals onto the pages of his novel like a caveman desperately trying to carve a story into a cave wall, yearning for his message to be shared with anyone out there who could possibly be listening. This message is that minorities can never truly have freedom. No matter how far Jim and Huck ran, they were eventually brought back to where they began, and forced to live their lives as they once did, because they were not the victors in the splattered battlefield of these pages, the ink running away from the bodies of the characters like blood from the losers of the battle, telling a story of how it all happened. No, Huck and Jim were the losers, minorities forced to wait until they were given the same responsibilities as the victors who were oppressing them. Mark Twain did not write this novel to be a story. No, Mark wrote this to be an explanation, maybe even a confession, of his beliefs and thoughts. It took Twain seven years to write this book. Most authors when

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