Huck Finn Response and Reflection

After reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I realized how although the book was written over a hundred years ago, Huck and parts of his story could exist today, or really in any time in history. I’m not talking about the running away with the slave, or witnessing first hand a volatile family feud, or even assisting a couple of con men. In reality, the relationships he has and they way he responds to them or his actions because of them are extremely real in any time in history.

Because I chose the psychoanalytic lens, I thought a lot about what made Huck the person he is in the novel and what relationships he had with different people that affected that. The three people who I thought had the biggest influence on him before, and even during the novel, where his Pap, Widow Douglas, and Tom Sawyer, and each relationship connected to some psychological idea that I had before reading the novel. Huck’s Pap was an alcoholic who beat and abused Huck. Most people believe that this would have made Huck try to avoid his father, however, Huck did what I believed to be true with many abused children. Huck would constantly excuse his father or deny that the abuse was as bad as it was, even though he acknowledge that his Pap shouldn’t be doing that and didn’t really like his father. When he was kidnapped, he made the best of the situation and made himself believe that living with his father wasn’t too bad, and he didn’t go to drastic measures to get away from his Pap until after he tried to kill Huck. It stuck with my belief that children, at least when they are still children, want to see the best in their parents, no matter how awful they are treated, and may even try to excuse their parent’s behavior. It wasn’t until Huck was in a better home with Widow Douglas, that he realized how bad he had it with his father, though he does not enjoy trying to be civilized by Widow Douglas. Though he enjoys being with her, and even to some extent he enjoys some parts of civilization, like learning to read and write, he plays it off as not being as good as living on the outskirts of the society.

The final person to be a big influence on Huck is his friend Tom Sawyer. Tom kind of acts as the voice of reason for Huck, though it is in a way that Huck feels like he is not being controlled. Huck’s relationship with Tom is one of the few he makes by choice and isn’t one that was forced upon him in someway. This creates a relationship where Huck wants to listen to and follow Tom. The way I saw this relationship was one of slight envy on Huck’s side. Huck most likely saw Tom’s life as an ideal one, and had an underlying level of jealousy. Because of this jealousy and envy, Huck listens to Tom in hopes that maybe he can be more like Tom.