The Progression of Huck’s Maturity
As the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, progresses, Huck becomes more mature. The reader can see this change in maturity by the level of his thinking and the changes it undergoes. The maturation of Huck is also evident in pranks that he plays, which progressively change his attitude and the way he thinks. The book starts off with a Huck that has a wild nature, and is not civilized. He is in Tom Sawyer’s “gang” that plays pranks of people. The prank that Tom and Huck play on Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, really stands out.
Huck and Tom take Jim’s hat and hide it up on a tree branch above him while he is sleeping. Huck later realizes that Jim “was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches” (Twain 16). His prank set Jim up for a bad image, which had a negative repercussion which Huck did not see, showing his immaturity. Another prank Huck plays in which he doesn’t judge the consequences before hand, is when he places the dead snake in Jim’s bed. Unaware that the snake’s mate would come after the body, Huck causes Jim to be bit by a snake, which is very dangerous.
Later on in the novel, Huck plays another prank on Jim, in which he pretends that nothing happened, when in reality, Huck and Jim are separated in the fog. He convinces Jim that Jim is crazy, and this concerns Jim. Huck feels “so mean [that he] could [have] almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back” after Jim insults Huck for making fun of Jim (Twain 75). He later apologizes, and regains the trust, but he realizes that not all of his pranks are good. Finally, Huck shows that he is much more mature when the “Duke” and the “Dauphin” come on the ship.
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Huck realizes that these two conmen are just bluffing their status. However he “never [says] nothing, never let on; kept it to [himself]” because then “you don’t have quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble” (Twain 104). He didn’t mind calling them what they wanted to be called, “‘long as it would keep peace in the family” (Twain 104). Overall, Huck grows in his maturity greatly. While encountering his personal experiences with Jim, and away from society, he grows as an individual with a greater moral and maturity.
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