Compare and contrast huck and tom.

Essay by rotimiHigh School, 11th grade November 2003

download word file, 4 pages 5.0

Downloaded 45 times

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story based around the friendship between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It tells of the various backgrounds and cultures of "Tom and Huck" and how their ignorant beliefs affect their everyday actions and dealings with others. Though Tom is portrayed to be more knowledgeable than Huck in the sense that his friends look up to him, Huck proves to be intelligent, and ironically more mature than Tom because he shows a great deal of growth as he questions the society's beliefs and values.

Tom is depicted in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a very adventuresome and foolhardy individual who gets caught up in his ignorance by trying to blend fiction with reality. He is so bored with the everyday activities around him that he resorts to acting out fictional risks with his friends. Tom is seen taking foolhardy risks in the beginning of the novel when he wants to start up a "band of robbers" (1).

He enlists his other friends and convinces them that they can relive the characters he reads about in his "pirate and robber-books" (7). He is also seen to be very inconsiderate by finding amusement in the despair of others such as Jim, when Huck is quoted as saying: Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in. (5) However, Tom sees himself as a "normal" kid in search for fun and he bases a lot of his judgment on the books he reads. He says, "Why blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing what's...