Huck Finn Response

Response to: Is Mark Twain speaking through Huck, or do you think Huck's point of view is different from Twain's? Explain.
Mark Twain writes the story Huckleberry Finn in the perspective of a naïve uneducated child. This lets Twain put a lot of the perspectives of that time period in to Huck without them even seeming like Huck, nor Twains actual opinion. Many of Huck's opinions are simply a product of the world around him. This simply lets the reader know what most people generally thought during this time. Although a large amount of Huck's opinion is based on general belief of that time, the rest I believe is Twains opinion.

Throughout the story Huck is torn between what society says and what he believes is the right thing. He knows that helping out a black person is a very wrong thing to do because he is basically stealing. But at the same time Huck feels that it is the right thing to do because Jim is a real person that Huck cares about and he doesn't see him as just property like everyone else does. This is definitely where Twain is bringing his own opinion in to the story. Twain writes the story in a way that a negative light is cast upon slavery. Twain tells it the way it really is, as a horrible thing. You can tell that twain disagrees with slavery. But he doesn't make it blatantly obvious. Because Twains readers during his time would have been very reluctant to read his book if it had purely been about how slavery was wrong. So he needed to slip it in there. To give the reader that opinion without them even knowing it. He made Jim the only real true pure character in the book. Yet you don't really realize that unless you really think about it. Huck's opinion about slavery is a huge part of Twains opinion in this case.

So throughout the story Twain is speaking his own opinion through Huck. Twain didn't have to agree with everything Huck said in the story for it to still agree with Twains opinions. I would definitely say that Twain did a very good job at this. It really didn't seem like Huck's views were really that of Mark Twains, but it really does make sense when you think about it.

Although Twain speaks his own opinion through Huck in some cases, in others Huck's opinion is simply that of the general population during that time. But it isn't necessarily that in these cases Huck's opinion differs from that of Twains. This could still be looked at as Twains opinion, it is simply Mark Twains opinion of what most people thought then. So Twains opinion still shows when Huck says something that, for example, promotes slavery. Because Twains opinion could be that Huck's argument is a very ignorant one and he felt that many people had this belief during that time and he wanted that belief to be a very weak argument towards slavery when told by Huck.