Huck Finn Hashtag Presentation: #IdontgiveaHuck

Huck has so many influences around him such as Jim, the Widow, and Pap. But with all these influences he acts based on his own personal beliefs and views on the situation. So our theme for our project is called #idontgiveahuck, since Huck is the epitome of “social defiance” in this novel. Throughout the whole novel he struggled with many tough decisions, and the most important being the conflict that he internally struggled with between what society has taught him and what his conscience is telling him.

Huck lived in Missouri, which follows many Southern beliefs; with one of them is the racist tension between the ideas of slavery. When Huck was being brought up, he was taught that slaves were not equals and that were far inferior. That is exemplified in the quote that Huck says after their discussion about the wrecked ship with Jim, he said “Well he was right; he was almost always right; he had an uncommon level head, for a nigger.” That perfectly describes how the general thought of slaves were perceived as people who are not as advanced as the white man therefore, they cannot come to the same conclusion that they do and have a different and wrong train of thought. Another idea that people held was that slaves were property. This was brought in front of Huck personally when his friend, Jim, was wanted for running away. This was brought to a dramatic climax when Huck said, “All right, then, I would rather go to hell.” and then ripped up his letter confessing everything about how he felt guilty for helping Jim escape. This shows a total defiance to what the social norm was and how Huck has evolved in a way that he now makes his own conscience decisions. Even though society has told him that Jim is property and should be returned, Huck values his friendship with Jim over that belief. Huck views Jim as his friend, but not only that, he starts to view him as an equal person, which is totally contrary to the social norm. Jim was unofficially part of Huck “family”, which was totally against the social norm.

Huck struggled with society’s traditional view of a family. He didn’t have a mother and only had a drunken father as his blood relative. Huck did not get along with his abusive father, so he strayed away from his dad, which led him to be an independent person. Instead of having what society would deem as a family, he gathered a group of friends who acted as a support group and was the closest thing Huck had to a family. Family doesn’t just stop as the group of people who you associate yourself with, but the house and environment that one grows up in. Another way he went against the norm was that he was never settled down in one household, instead he never felt “at home” anywhere until he was on the run.  When Huck was on the raft, on the move, he describes it as “There warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” This is not what people would normally consider comfortable or a home, but to Huck, who has not had a true home since the day he was born, he felt comfort of not being confined and the idea of traveling to new places. Huck never felt at home until he wasn’t in one, he was always running away from home and also always running away from civilization.

Huck strayed away from regular civilization and the social norm all together. Whenever someone tried to make him “normal”, he would revert back to his instinctive ways. He would run away from everything that civilization not only stood for, but civilization’s acceptable behaviors. Huck explained this by, ”The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would criticize me…I got my old rags and my sugar hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.” This exemplifies Huck’s defiance for everything that stood for normal. The only thing that felt normal to Huck was everything that wasn’t society’s norms.

Anthony Bontatibus, Katrina Ayala, Praneeth Bolgodu, Jay Chen