Huckleberry Finn- How a Journey with Obstacles Leads to Self Growth and Heightens Our Understanding of the World

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We’d been gone 2 days, but somehow the town seemed different; smaller. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Although I hadn’t seen them in 10 years I know that I’ll miss them forever.’ We often perceive barriers as means of sheer obscurement- a blockage, some might say, to reaching our yearns and desires. However, obstacles can unknowingly heighten our understandings and perceptions of life and foster an increased knowledge on our respective world. Such an idea is intermittently explored within Twains novel ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and the film ‘Stand by Me’. Both texts similarly explore the changes that journeys and their associated obstacles enunciate. Good morning/ Afternoon Ms Naidoo and fellow classmates. Throughout Twain’s entire novel, we are given an understanding and clear insights onto Hucks journey down the Mississippi river as he slowly overcomes the physical and mental barriers that had built for him due to the environment he had grown up in, in this case about black people and how they were inferior. At the beginning of the novel, when speaking of Jim, Huck says: Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got so stuck up on account of having seen the devil. He says this because he believes Jim has gotten stuck up due to receive attention from other quote ‘niggers’. One major example of Huck slowly overcoming his racism was depicted in chapter 15. The fog, in this chapter, was a physical barrier that represented Hucks mental obstacle, the one where he thought it was ok to use Jim, as a form of entertainment. It is in this chapter when Huck overcomes this barrier as he says, ‘I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way’. He says this after realizing that lying to Jim after Jim had been worried sick for him, had made Jim upset. This is one of the

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