The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a perfect example of an author ahead of their time. It is a wonderful capturing of a young boy who appears to be so life smart that he is able to bravely venture off on his own and stand up against nearly all the adults he comes across for their bad behaviors and bad or selfish intentions, even when he has the underlying thought of ending up in hell for it. At the time the book was written, the Civil War was not all that far behind us as a country, and certainly most people had not come far in their thoughts and treatment of African American people. Twain's choice to make Jim the person in the book to be the one all the others should strive to be like was bold for that time. Also, choosing to have Huck, an uneducated and unsophisticated boy who was completely against …show more content…
Everyone around him seemed clueless about what decent behavior should be. Many people of that time would have seen the book as being ridiculous because of those elements and would have not seen it for the truth it held. Even with his natural smarts, one of Huck's biggest weaknesses came when he followed Tom Sawyer at the end and unnecessarily prolonged Jim's captivity and even put the three of them in danger just to humor Tom's selfish need for adventure. This was especially bad in light of the fact that Tom had the knowledge that Jim had been freed by his owner, Miss Watson, who had died three months before. This was a perfect example of how people at that time, even Huck, were not ready to treat African Americans as equals. Huck had definitely formed the opinion that Jim was very human while listening to him cry over missing his family and feeling deep remorse over beating his daughter for not listening to him and then realizing she was deaf and couldn't hear him. Twain pointing these things out should make even the most racist person of the time realize how wrong it was to not see that slaves were people with real feelings like