The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay Example for Free

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is absolutely relating a message to readers about the ills of slavery but this is a complex matter. On one hand, the only truly good and reliable character who is free of the hypocritical nature that other whit characters are plagued with is Jim who, according to the institution of slavery, is subhuman. Thus, one has to wonder about the presence of satire in Huck Finn. Furthermore, Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn after slavery was made illegal and his choice to set this story in a pre-civil war time when slaves were still held is significant. What truly makes the thesis statement about race and slavery in Huck Finn complex is is that there are several traces of some degree of racism in the novel, including the use of the ‘N’ word. By using the word, the book portrays the atmosphere of the south and slavery at that time. David Bradley, a Mark Twain expert featured in â€Å"Born to Trouble: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn†, says that, â€Å"The ‘N’ was a word used during that time to call black people. It was a common word† (Born to Trouble). Apart from this, when Aunt Sally hears about an explosion and she asks Huck if anybody was hurt, he responds by saying â€Å"No’m,† â€Å"Killed a slave†(Peter Salwen). These few lines of dialogue say all there is to say about how blacks were viewed at that time; that they are â€Å"nobody†, less than human, with lives that are of little or no value to anyone. The racist attitudes of the south are most evident in the character of Huck Salas 2 Finn himself and how he relates to the runaway slave, Jim. Huck is nothing but a product of his environment and upbringing. Although he reflects the cruelty and injustice of the south towards blacks, he is totally unaware that this is the wrong attitude to take (Fiskin). At first when Huck is unsure how to deal with Jim, he displays attitudes that are a reflection of his times. He plays tricks on Jim and entraps him in a dialogue that makes the latter appear especially foolish, or perhaps, to make Jim painfully aware of his own inferiority. The trick the weighed most heavily on both Huck and Jim is when, after having disappeared from the raft, Huck pretends to have been there all along. The worried Jim insists that he believed Huck had almost drowned, but Huck plays Jim for a fool, tricking him into believing that he had only been dreaming (Twain 186). Jim, in turn, is made to appear as the Negro stereotype of the times: a backward buffoon with his slave dialect and many superstitions (Gregory). It is only much later on that he takes on a more human face as we discover his admirable character, particularly his fierce loyalty to his friend Huck (Born to Trouble). Huck also reflects the white South’s belief that blacks were vastly inferior. In the conversation about King Solomon and the Frenchmen in Chapter 14, Huck ends the conversation by saying to himself: â€Å"I see it warn’t any use wasting words – you can’t learn a n†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ to argue. So I quit† (Twain 104). Seemingly frustrated with the turn of the conversation, Huck ends up being dismissive of the black man’s intellectual capacity, his ability to learn, see reason or think rationally. Again, this points to the white South’s inherent belief that the black man is inferior. Salas 3 Early on this relationship, Huck is also prone to saying things that further show how deeply racist attitudes have been ingrained in him. After the trick he plays on Jim, he is reluctant to apologize to someone society dictates is far beneath him: â€Å"it was fifteen minutes before I could work myself to go and humble myself to a slave† (Twain 107). Jim must also accept the fact that as a black, he is inferior to whites in these times. Friendship doesn’t negate this rule of society; even his good friend Huck is far superior to him. Even as far into the book as Chapter 31, Huck still holds himself accountable to the strict racist rules of his community, where empowering a black man is a â€Å"low-down thing†(Twain 219). However in this course of the tale, Huck’s attitude toward his black companion begins to shift. This is a struggle for him at first, and a reader can get a definite sense of Huck grappling with how society has always forced him to think. For example, although he shows reluctance in apologizing to Jim for his trick, he really does feel like the trash Jim likens him to (Twain 107). Not only does he get over his reluctance and apologizes to Jim, but makes a firm pledge to himself not to â€Å"do him no more mean tricks; and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d knowed it would make him feel that way† (Twain 107). Another instance is when Huck encounters a group of white men looking for runaway slaves. He struggles momentarily about the morality of hiding Jim, still thinking of the latter as a stolen piece of property and not a person. Huck then swings the other way and conceals Jim from the men with a clever ruse (Twain 117). In the end after a long and hard struggle, both Huck and Jim achieve a certain degree of freedom. Not just freedom form â€Å"sivilization† for Huck Salas 4 and slavery for Jim, but freedom from the rigid mindset of the racist South. Huck learns to look at Jim not merely as a Negro, a piece of property or someone inferior and worthless, but as a human being and as a friend.

Traits Of Adolf Hitler :: essays research papers

"He Failed as a student in classical secondary schools, a situation that contributed to his desire to become an artist. He went to Vienna in 1903. His years there were characterized by melancholy, aimlessness, and racial hatred,"stated by Alan Bullock (Allen Bullock 1962, 97). This does not sound like the life of a the future leader of Germany. But what Adolf Hitler lost in scholastics he made up for it and then some in leadership skills. Hitler, having great leadership skills, showed that leadership skills can be more important than brain power.A good education was something that Adolf Hitler did not have. He dropped out of school at the age of sixteen, spending only 10 years in school. Sadly, he didn't even get into a art academy, even though it was his goal in life to become an artist. Arthur Schlesinger says that "However in his last year of school he failed German and Mathematics, and only succeeded in Gym and Drawing. He drooped out of school at the age of 16, spending a total of 10 years in school,"(Arthur M. Schlesinger 1985, 14) Even though he didn't have a normal amount of education, he still became the leader of Germany. Adolf Hitler, nevertheless, was a great orator and when he spoke, everybody listened. He sometimes spoke several times a day, moving from town to town seemingly tireless. Ken McVay had this to say about this subject, "He was a tireless speaker and before he came to power would sometimes give as many as three or four speeches on the same day, often in different cites. Even his opponents concede that he is the greatest orator that Germany has ever known,"[sic](Ken McVay 1995, (Internet)). Though he didn't have a good education his orator skill, which is a leadership skill, helped him achieve his goal.Along with being a tireless orator, Hitler also possessed the quality to make everybody listen to him, a quality that most, not including Mr. Marcero, saline high school teachers could use. He would get the audience by telling them what they wanted to hear, then he would manipulate the people to arose their emotions. "His power and Fascination in speaking lay almost wholly in his ability to sense what the given audience wanted to hear and then to manipulate his theme in such a way that he would arouse the emotions of the crowd,"(Strasser 1993, (Internet)).

Magic Toyshop Essay

The Magic Toyshop is the second novel of the feminist writer Angela Carter. It is one of the most popular of her early books. In Carter’s works mythological and Biblical themes often appear, and The Magic Toyshop is a good example of that. This essay is intended to discuss the introductory chapter of The Magic Toyshop, in which Carter rewrites a major Biblical story. The Magic Toyshop follows the story of a teenage girl, Melanie. She is one of three children, her younger brother is Jonathon and her five year old sister is Victoria. They live in the English countryside in a middle class family. Their house is spacious; they all have their own bedrooms. Their parents are rich, successful and the children have everything they need. The children have a middle aged governess Mrs. Rundle. She is overweight, was never married, only added the Mrs. title to her name a few years ago as a present to herself. Melanie has a fear of becoming someone like Mrs. Rundle. She does not believe in God but she prays that she would marry and have sex in her life. She is worried about her weight because she thinks she is too thin, but she would not eat too much either because then she might become fat and never marry. She already sees herself as someone’s wife; she looks at herself as a male would do. (Gamble 69) The novel tells the story of the children becoming orphans and having to leave their home. Their parents are killed in a plane crash and the three children must leave the countryside to live with their uncle in London. Uncle Phillip owns a toyshop and is a toymaker himself. The orphans do not know anything about him; Melanie’s only memory of him is that when she was a little girl he made her a jack in the box which was very scary. They do not know that the world they are about to enter is radically different from the one they lived in until now. At the beginning of the novel Melanie is a happy fifteen year old girl who is starting to discover herself. She explores her body, discovers it as a colonizer discovers the unknown land. She likes to pose in front of her mirror; she plays the roles of the characters of paintings (by male painters naturally). The novel uses the terminologies of explorers thus making us believe there is a male voice behind the words. Melanie’s only wish is to marry well. She is already getting ready for married life, she is making herself ready for a husband. She believes that marriage is the only way to have inancial and emotional security, the only way to be a respectable woman and to have a happy life. This is the only way she knows. This is what the culture, the social background of the age indoctrinated her to believe. She is dreaming of a perfect husband who is handsome, gentle, amiable, who has a good job and adequate financial background. Although she is a little worried about not getting this perfect life, not having sex, she genuinely believes that things are going to work out for the best. Melanie is planning to spend her adolescence preparing for the life that comes after. However soon enough she will realize that life is not a fairytale. She will meet and fall in love with a boy that does not fit in the image of the perfect husband she pictured for herself, a boy that she would have never thought to fell for under normal circumstances. She will realize how these circumstances can make her grow up in a few days – or even a few hours as on the train ride to London she realizes she has to be the mother of her little brother and sister – , and how they can suddenly take away all of her dreams and principles. However there is another way to interpret the beginning of the first chapter, the scene where she is exploring her body. Melanie is not only preparing herself for her future groom, but she is exploring her own sexuality too. She is in the age when she realizes that she is a woman, that she has not only grown mentally but physically too. â€Å"In Carter’s own words, Melanie ‘is very conscious of desire, she is filled with it. And that gives her power’. † (Gamble 69-70) One night Melanie decides to go further then posing in her own bedroom. Her parents are not home, they are in America. In the darkness of the night, when everyone in the house is asleep, she goes to her parent’s bedroom. She looks at their wedding photograph and starts thinking about her parents. How she cannot imagine her mother naked, as she never saw her that way – she even jokes about her mother being born with clothes on -, and how her father always wears the same suit. She wonders if her parents had sex before their wedding – this makes her believe she really is growing up if thoughts like this occur in her mind. She notices Uncle Phillip in the picture and thinks about the old jack in the box she was so afraid of. Then she goes over to her mother’s dressing table and looks into the mirror. She starts posing there too and feels that she looks different in her mother’s mirror. This moment can be understood again as a flesh of transition between childhood and becoming a woman. Being in her parent’s room is like pretending to be an adult just like they are. Posing in her mother’s mirror Melanie is trying to imagine how she will look like and feel as an adult, married woman. This moonlit night is the one when the fall happens†¦ Looking at her parent’s wedding picture Melanie decides to try on her mother’s wedding dress. She finds the dress and puts it on but it is too big. She is a little disappointed but still thinks she looks beautiful in it. She feels like a bride. â€Å"A bride. Whose bride? But she was, tonight, sufficient for herself in her own glory and did nor need a groom. † (Carter 16) Melanie decides to go out to the garden. She first feels free and excited; the night was so different from the one she imagined. The moonlit garden was like the Garden of Eden. â€Å"She was alone. In her carapace of white satin, she was the last, the only woman. † (Carter 17) This realization of loneliness soon turns into panic. She truly feels alone and feels what happening is too much. Crying she runs back to the front door but it is closed†¦ She forgot her keys. Suddenly the sweet, dark night turns into a scary land. Melanie realizes what she did was forbidden. She is frightened, she thinks there is something in the dark. After Mrs. Rundle’s cat appears in the garden, Melanie feels a little more comfortable. She starts to pull herself together and decides she will climb up the apple tree to her window. (The apple tree can be a symbol of Eden again). But she cannot do that in the wedding dress. The cat gives her so much comfort that she can take the dress off. Then something happens: she realizes her own nakedness as never before. â€Å"She was horribly conscious of her own exposed nakedness. She felt a new and final kind of nakedness, as if she had taken even her own skin off and now stood clothed in nothing, nude in the ultimate nudity of the skeleton. (Carter 21) This scene might be interpreted as the happenings in the Bible right after the Fall. The serpent deceives Eve so she and Adam both eat from the forbidden tree. â€Å"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. † (New International Bible, Genesis 3:7) The naked Melanie puts down the dress and the cat climbs on it. It scratches the dress. Melanie starts climbing up the tree, she does not know how long it takes but she finally gets to her room. She bleeds form â€Å"hundreds of cuts† but does not mind the pain. She honestly regrets what she had done that night, but cannot take it back. She ate from the forbidden fruit and knows that she deserves the consequences. Right now pain seems to be the punishment. The morning has come and when Mrs. Rundle, Jonathon and Victoria leave the house Melanie is alone in the house with her sin. Somebody is knocking on the door. It is a messenger boy with a telegram in his hand. â€Å"As soon as she saw him, she knew what the telegram contained, as if the words were printed on his forehead. (Carter 24) She runs to the bathroom and vomits. She reads the telegram and realizes what she already guessed was true. Her parents were dead. Melanie’s childhood, her fairytale life ended in this moment. She committed a sin last night and now was expelled from Eden. â€Å"This ‘wedding dress night when she married the shadows’ (Carter 77) exiles her and her younger brother and sister from their comfortable, liberal, middle-class home in the country to live in a dark, narrow house above Uncle Phillip’s toyshop in south London. (Sage 15) And what was Melanie’s fault really? As Lorna Sage says it was the â€Å"stepping over the boundary between reality and fantasy† (Sage 15) Melanie, Jonathon and Victoria are taken to their Uncle Phillip’s house. Melanie soon realizes she will have to live there in terror, in constant fear of her uncle. She has to say good bye to the magical life she had in the countryside and has to grow up sooner then expected. We can understand Uncle Phillip’s house as Purgatory. She goes through a grueling rite of passage into the state of being a woman. Whatever way she might once have grown up is simply cancelled after she arrived at Uncle Phillip’s. † (Day 25) Melanie goes through hell until one day Uncle Phillips ends this story. When he learns that his wife has a sexual relationship with her own brother, he sets the house on fire. â€Å"In the end only Melanie and Finn are left standing amongst the wreckage staring at one another in wild surmise, Adam and Eve at the beginning of a new world. †

Preserving Innocence in The Catcher in the Rye - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 671 Downloads: 7 Date added: 2019/05/28 Category Literature Essay Level High school Tags: Catcher in The Rye Essay Did you like this example? The worst worry for a child is losing a favorite toy or forgetting to bring lunch. A childrs innocence is a fundamental piece of their adolescence. It suggests they are not completely mindful of the worldrs inconveniences. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Preserving Innocence in The Catcher in the Rye" essay for you Create order J.D. Salingerrs The Catcher in the Rye portrays Holden Caulfield, a struggling 16 year old and narrator of the novel, values innocence in particular and attempts to preserve it throughout the story. It is clear to readers that Holden obtains many psychological traits that result in his stay at a sanatorium. Despite the fact that he has made irrational choices for his age, he had purposes for his decisions. Throughout Holdenrs life, he has felt the necessity to preserve innocence from his psychological traits like selective memory and emotional instability. In the novel, Holden is conveyed as naive to the realities of adulthood and wishes to forever save the purity of childhood innocence. Holden uses his selective memory to reminisce about his encounters when innocence was apparent. For instance, when Holden was headed to get a record for Phoebe, his younger sister, he sees a young boy singing, If a body catch a body coming through the rye (Salinger 129). When Holden recalls what he heard to Phoebe, she corrects him claiming, Itrs ?If a body meet a body coming through the rye (Salinger 191). Holden knew she was right, however, when he had seen the innocence of the child, his selective memory and longing to become the catcher in the rye made him overlook this detail. This is a reference to the infamous Robert Burns poem, Comin Thro the Rye, which is a poem about sex, an adult reality that Holden cannot comprehend. The young child singing about a catcher influenced him to disregard the genuine meaning of the poem. Furthermore, Holdenrs utmost desire to preserve purity is shown all in the novel by his recurring emotional instability. Holdenrs date with Sally, a woman he likes, is one of the numerous examples in which reveal this trait. For instance, he asked her, How would you like to get the hell out of here? I could get a job somewhere and we could live somewhere with a brook and all and, later on, we could get married or something (Salinger 147). Of course, this led to an unpleasant argument that influenced him to make the conclusion that she was a phony and did not contact her much afterward. Once again, Holden is in conflict with adulthood and realizes that his innocence was taken away when he came to Sally on the date. He wishes that he could elude from the adult world with someone he had believed would help preserve purity, yet is compelled to reason that she is phony like the rest of the world. In addition, Holden demonstrates his emotional instability due to his violent thoughts and outbursts. When Holden saw the swear words f*** you composed on the walls of Phoebers school, he has brutal contemplations. He exclaims, I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how Id smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. I kept wanting to kill whoever written it (Salinger 221). When Holden saw these words in Phoebers elementary school, he saw the innocence of a child being taken away and he was so angry and frustrated, that he thought of hurting the child. This only helped his belief that grown-ups ruin and contaminate children. All through the novel, Holden was confronted with many adult concepts with which he did not want to be associated. He prefers that adulthood does not exist so that the innocence of a child can remain throughout his or her life. He used his selective recollection and emotional instability to try and last the pureness of a child. He feels that no child should grow up and be compelled to live in the world of adults due to the standards of society, and tries his hardest to avail these children as the catcher of the rye.