The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written by Mark Twain. The book is primarily about Huck but involves other important characters who have a strong affect on Huck through their friendship with him and the love they share with him. I feel the end of the book contained a strong significance.
Friendship is an important theme in this book, as Huck has relationships with the many people he meets. The person that he is friends with from the beginning until the end of the book is Tom Sawyer. The two have lots of fun together thanks to the adventures Tom creates for them. However, the friendship is a little unequal since they both seem to agree that Tom's ideas are better, even though this frequently not true. I think that Huck developed a deeper friendship with Jim than he had with Tom. I feel this way, because they had to sur come many obstacles in order to be friends. This is due to the fact that Jim was a slave, and it was not considered proper for slaves to be helped by white men. The friendship between them was put to the test when Huck had to decide if he should turn Jim in or not. Since Huck did not turn Jim in, he proved that he valued Jim. Additionally, since he freed Jim (although he was already free), Huck proved just how important Jim was.
Love is something that Huck was deprived of as a child. His father did not treat him right, so Huck was loved by his friends, instead. Widow Douglas displayed that she loved Huck since she took him under her care in order to give him a better life. Huck however, never seemed to display his love for others. For instance, though it was obvious he appreciated the widow, he did not mind it when his father kidnapped him from her home. There is one character who Huck seemed to display a special love for. That character is Mary Jane. By the way he describes her, I felt that Huck fell in love with her. He states, "I reckon I've thought of her a many and a many a million times." (p. 189). I feel that she was his one true love and he treated her as such, through the way that he made sure the duke and king could not steal the money that belonged to Mary Jane and her two sisters.
The end of the book has a strong significance on the book as a whole. In the last paragraph, Huck states, "I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." (p. 283). This closing statement leaves the book as somewhat of a cliffhanger. The way I understood it, I expect that Huck went out west where the land is still territory and not yet states. He is going there in order to be free and live by himself. Huck is saying that he would rather live alone than with others because he wants to do things his way, not the way that is considered to be of civilized people. Additionally, in the last paragraph, there is a comment on how much trouble it is to write a book. The way I perceived this, is that it is not actually Huck speaking here. This is a statement made by Mark Twain, to the reader, that tells that he struggled as a writer when he wrote this novel. As for the rest of the ending, I liked it. It summed up all the loose ends very quickly and matter-of-fact. I thought that was a good strategy because it does not bore the reader. I was not surprised to learn that the dead man Jim found in the house was Pap, because I had predicted that it would be.
I found this book to be interesting through the perspective of investigating the thoughts and relationships of characterization. However, I did not like many parts where the events moved along very slowly, containing too much description, and seeming to have little importance to the overall plot of the book.