Huck Finn’s Transformation Essay

By the end of the first half of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I noticed a few changes in Huckleberry Finn’s attitude towards certain things. Huck’s outlook on life shifted rather dramatically before pap had kidnapped him. Though he had mixed feelings regarding his life with the widow, he, for the most part, was content living with her because not only was he educated, clothed, and fed properly, but he also felt slightly protected from pap. However, after pap captured Huck and locked him inside a secluded cabin, his opinion changed. Initially, he was scared of pap and was miserable being locked inside for days on end. He remained scared of pap, but gradually began to enjoy life without the widow. He said, â€Å"I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed, and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Twain 32). Many transformations took place in Huck after he feigned his death and ran away from pap as well. Some of the changes were fairly minor, but I felt that they added up and also proved that Huck was not as stubborn as he once was. They proved that he truly did have the ability to change. A paradigm of a minor change was in Huck’s opinion regarding praying. At the beginning of the novel, he looked down upon praying and religion because he thought them to be useless and claimed that praying didn’t work. But after he found the loaves of bread with quicksilver inside them, he thought that the widow, or someone else, had probably prayed that the bread would find him, and it did. Huck then decided that praying might be effective (45). The most significant change that I noticed in Huck was at the end of chapter 15. Jim and Huck had been separated and could not find each other because of the foggy conditions. However, Huck thought it would be funny to fool Jim and convince him that it was all in his dream. When Jim realized that Huck was lying, he was extremely hurt and offended. At first, Huck let Jim walk away, but then he said, â€Å"It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither† (89). This was a huge deal, because at that time, a white person would never apologize to a slave.