What determines who Jim and Huck are? Nature or Nurture

Essay by Hitomi42High School, 11th gradeA+, March 2003

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BY JG

Can the influence of Nature and Nurture on two souls be compared? Nature and Nurture both determine Huck's and Jim's personality ad behavior. Nature gives them their inborn traits often. Nature is how they are treated, and Nurture is the society, who natures them, and society nurtured them.

Nature helps Huck become the person he is because the way your treated is the way you treat other people at times. Huck is thirteen whose place in society is second to a slave, like Jim. Huck's father is a drunk who takes care of Huck from time to time. Repeatedly Huck is filthy and left homeless. The nurturing society has failed to protect Huck from his father, because they didn't care for him, and nurture him. That doesn't go for everyone though, Widow Douglas took Huck in and tried to ameliorate Huck. Huck starts church and proper schooling. Even though Huck is a child the nurturing that he receives pushes him away from the cynicism of the world around him, which brings about another way nurturing has made who Huck is.

At this time of age, African Americans were still in bondage as slaves, which brings about Jim in the story. Society does not nurture Jim; instead they treat him as an object of property. Huck doesn't agree with this though, according to Huck's sense of dialectic and fairness it's not only acceptable but conscientiously good to help Jim. Huck's natural reasoning and his acquiescence to think through a situation on its own entitlement is what leads him to some conclusions that are right in their appurtenance but would clash society. An example is when he meets a group of slave-hunters, that telling a lie is sometimes the right course of action, in other words that sometimes lying is...