Saturday, August 3, 2013

How does The Adventures of Huck Finn oppose slavery?

I think that one of the fundamental ways the book opposes
slavery is through the idea that one cannot contain or limit the notion of human freedom.  Both
Huck and Jim seek freedom.  Huck's concept is more undefinable, while Jim's is fairly well seen,
but both seek to establish a domain of freedom that lies outside the realm of society's
definition of freedom.  In the journey that both take, there is a strong symbolic statement about
how freedom, the notion of exercising autonomy, exists beyond the ideas of social conformity and
what social orders might suggest.  In this light, freedom is a transcendent quality that the
individual feels compelled to pursue.  These ideas are stunning repudiations of slavery and the
people who advocate it.  As opposed to tradition bound ideas that determine what freedom is and
who has it, the narrative of Huck and Jim depict freedom to be quite a different element.  Within
this is a strict opposition to slavery.

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