Huckleberry Finn’s Families

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates the story of young Huck, who lived in the late 1830’s to early 1840’s. Taking place after the novel, Tom Sawyer, Huck is now under the care of a widow, while his drunken father is out of the picture. Huck is taken from the widow’s by his father and soon discovers he is not completely happy in either place. After faking his own death, Huck takes a raff down the river, looking for a new start away from civilization. Later joined with the runaway slave, Jim, Huck enjoys his own travels on and off the Mississippi River. However, the most interesting element of the novel is that of the nature of family. Huck does not settle down with any of the families he discovers on his adventures because he has a family in his relationship with Jim.
Despite Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being one of the greatest novels ever written, many want it banned because of the relationship Huck has with the runaway slave, Jim. In the beginning, the only think blocking Huck from turning Jim in is “I said I wouldn’t, and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low down Ablitionist and despite me for keeping mum- but that don’t make no difference. I ain’t agoing to tell, and I ain’t agoing back there anyways”. Even before they became friends, Huck decided that he was going to keep his word to a runaway slave, though this meant he may be shunned and harmed for this decision. After a while of traveling, Huck and Jim are separated by a fog. Though Huck returns after a few hours, Jim had been worried sick, calling Huck’s name, and heartbroken that his friend may have been lost to him. When he is awoken by Huck, playing a trick on him, he is angry and tells Huck so. This makes Huck feel regretful enough to want to kiss his foot and later apologize to him. Toward the end of the book, Jim is captured as a runaway slave and Huck has to decide whether he writes a letter to the widow and tell her where Jim is or he breaks Jim out. Huck writes the letter and then “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”, declares Huck before he tears up the letter. Huck has made his decision; “…I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again”. The bond between these two is so strong that impossible odds could not keep Jim in slavery again.
During the novel, Huck meets and stays with many families. In the beginning, Huck lives a widow and then is kidnapped by his father. The widow was religious and civilized. She was a more permanent mother figure, but lacking in a nuclear family structure. With her structured nurturing, Huck changed in small ways to mold to hers. However, Huck did not mind leaving too much. Huck’s father, Pap, is more of an outlaw figure. A-religious and barbaric, he believed in more situational ethics. Without any structure, he locked up Huck in a cabin all the time, leaving them to be more self-sufficient. To escape both fates, Huck fakes his own death. During the raff journey, he meets other families such as the Grangerfords and Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. The wealthy Grangerfords were in a rather pointless blood feud with the Shepherdsons. This battle was over thirty years old; no one remembered how it began and why anymore. Huck decides to move out toward the Territory because he didn’t want “…Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before”. He does not have the drive to stay with any of these families, though he could have.
In the end of the novel, Huck does not expressly admit that he thinks of Jim as family. Without that bond, he wouldn’t have changed his view on the runaway. At the beginning, Huck and Tom played a prank on Jim in his sleep. Huck viewed Jim as just a slave that the widow owned. During their journey together, Jim becomes more human and less like another race, but just someone with different skin. He had personality and value beyond his ability to do free labor in Huck’s eyes. The nature of family is tricky in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but the closet thing that Huck considered family and stayed with because of that belonging, was Jim.