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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
will be proposed. So, “He spoke to the duke, and he said he hoped it wouldn’t take but a few hours, because it got mighty heavy and tiresome to him when he had to lay all day in the wigwam tied with the rope” (Twain 118). This small thing is a sign that he is human in Huck‘s eyes, and doesn’t feel okay about being tied up just because a white man tells him to sit still. This act brings Huck’s principles a little closer to those of today and not of his society’s. Later in the book though, when Tom reenters the story, Huck tries to imitate him. Hutchinson describes her outrage about this:
The humiliation that Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind softening--and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written: it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the live of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness). (89-90)
The boys both show their lack of regard for a black man, and their racist views by doing things to make Jim’s escape ‘by the book‘. Jim tries to refuse, but is virtually ignored: “Tom, I doan’ want no rats. Dey’s de dad-blamedest creturs to sturb a body, en rustle roun’ over ‘im, en bite his feet, when he’s tryin’ to sleep...’ ‘But Jim, you got to have ‘em--the all do. So don’t make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain’t ever without rats’” (Twain 198). In this dialogue between Jim and Tom, Jim is told what to do by a 12-year-old boy. It is again another instance of racism, because as Hutchinson said a white man would never be treated that way. Huck also goes along with this plan of Tom’s, again showing how society rules his principles about racism. Huck tries to flee from society, but as soon as it finds him again, or he finds it, he again becomes the same person from the beginning of the book who just laughed at “niggers.”
At the end of the book Huck is relatively the same racist boy who believes society’s teachings. At the same time he rejects them, but can never completely escape them. According to Johnson, “The [next page]