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Does Huck Change Throughout the Novel

In: English and Literature

Submitted By hitosura22
Words 850
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Does Huck Change Throughout the Novel He does change, although, true to human nature, his character is consistent. In the beginning of the novel, Huck tends to have an immature side to him. There are some things in the beginning that show that Huck still has a very childish side to him. "They get down on one thing when they don't know nothing about it." (Twain 2) This is showing the ignorance and stubbornness that all children experience throughout life. He thinks as if everything he does is right and everyone else is wrong. "That all comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it." (Twain 40) This goes one step further. This shows Huck's Immaturity and Stupidity gone one step too far when he puts the snake in Jim's bed and he ends up getting bit by it. If Huck was more mature and less childish he wouldn't have been playing this so called joke on Jim. Huck learns that jokes have a limit to them at times and need to be thought out more clearly.

The most significant way, in which he changes in his attitude toward Jim, accepting Jim as a person. At the end of Chapter XV he apologies to Jim--it was quite a thing for a white person to apologize to a black person in 1845--for having tricked him in the fog. And then, in Chapter XXXI he comes to the most intense understanding of this feeling when he decides, thinking it wrong, to go to Hell for Jim because he loves him, rather than obeying the law that says a slave is property and should be restored to the owner. He goes back on this feeling, seemingly when he allows Tom to play with Jim as a tool in Tom's romance fantasies. But at the end he is disillusioned with Tom, though humorously accepting of him. Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is...

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