'Treasure Island is a 'rites of passage' novel that tells of Jim Hawkins' spiritual and psychological growth from child like innocence to an experienced, wise young man. The Theme of this novel is the development of the central character

GCSE English Treasure Island Coursework 'Treasure Island is a 'rites of passage' novel that tells of Jim Hawkins' spiritual and psychological growth from child like innocence to an experienced, wise young man. The Theme of this novel is the development of the central character Jim from childhood to maturity. Jim Hawkins is a curious, resilient and volatile boy. The writer portrays him as volatile through his spontaneous and often non-thinking approach to situations. The reader sees this when Jim jumps ashore with the pirates or runs off to capture the Hispaniola. The writer does this because it keeps the plot flowing, and adds a dimension of unpredictability. The condition of the time the writer is writing about demand Jim to be resilient in the face of it all. Enormous pressure is put on Jim early in the novel, when his father falls ill. Jim at a young age of probably twelve is now running the "Admiral Benbow". But at the time that this is being written about this is not unheard of. Shorter life spans meant that children where put to work much earlier and Jim would have already been quite experienced in the work place. In the absence of Jim's father, he looks towards new role models. I believe that to begin with Jim does in some ways respect Captain Bones as he does fear him, 'This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on

  • Word count: 931
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Huckleberry Fin

Huckleberry Fin Huckleberry Finn warms the heart of the reader by placing an ignorant white boy by the name of Huckleberry Finn in some strange situations, having him tell his remarkable story the way it streams into his own eyes. Huckleberry Finn is nearly always confused on account of so many different kinds of people having such different impressions upon him; he turns to his own heart and intelligence for guidance. Huckleberry Finn has a heart of gold, and grows as a person throughout the story. Huckleberry Finn's setting jumps around to a number of different places. The beginning takes place in St. Petersburg, Missouri in around the 1840s, before the Civil War. Huckleberry lived in a very "sivilized" household; a rather prosperous one as well, with the Widow Douglas. It was a time of slavery, though throughout the entire novel there was very little said to put down African Americans. The characters in the book, as many as there were, were all created by twain to respect and acknowledge the decency in their slaves. There are two main characters in Huckleberry Finn: Huckleberry Finn, and Jim, a runaway slave. Huckleberry Finn finds himself torn between his own judgment of helping Jim escape, and the people around him who support slavery in its entirety. He is in a bad and dangerous situation while with Jim, because anyone might possibly think Jim a runaway

  • Word count: 1005
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn There are many wonderful books written by great authors. However the writer who inspired me the most is the one and only Mark Twain. I was impressed by his books since I was a child. The two novels which I enjoyed were two of his most famous works, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These books are considered to be masterpieces by a lot of people. Samuel Clemens, better known by his pseudonym Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When Samuel Clemens was twelve years old, his father died. After his father's death Clemens went to become a printer's apprentice. His childhood dream was to become a steamboat salesman, and ride along the river down the stream. He had this goal achieved early in life until the Civil War came along putting him out of business. The Civil War forced Clemens out west in search of gold but ended up becoming a reporter for the Virginia City newspaper. While Twain was traveling the nation with his lectures he met his future wife Olivia. While trying to earn Olivia's love, Twain wrote over two-hundred love letters, trying to earn her fathers respect and have permission to marry her. He then after this wrote his very first best seller which was called " Innocence Abroad". Through many writers Twain was slowly becoming the United States first celebrity.

  • Word count: 687
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Tom sawyer.

Tom sawyer Mark Twain was actually called Samuel Langhorne Clemens in real life. Mark Twain was only his writing name. He is known world wide for his 2 famous novels Tom Sawyer and The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark was born on the 30th of November in 1835. He died because of heart failure on the 21st of April 1910. St Petersburg is symbolic of the adult world. Mark exposes the pretentiousness, hypocrisy and even the evil that can grow in the world of adults. He does this powerfully by the use of satire and humour. He compares the world of the adults to the world of boyhood. This is a world of innocence, imagination and freedom. In the world of the adults Tom is restrained from doing all the things of boyhood. Aunt Polly keeps Tom in the house and hardly ever lets him out to play. There is no trust between Aunt Polly and Tom. There is a perfect example of this when Tom has to paint the fence and he got it done with the help of all the other boys but Aunt Polly did not believe he got it done and goes to check the fence. Sid sides with the adults and becomes one of them; he also acts like them, as through lies and deceit he makes Aunt Polly believe he does nothing wrong. The pretentiousness of the adults is shown through out the novel. For example take the part when the minister is reading the people who are honouring him but aren't even listening to him. The adults

  • Word count: 918
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Huck Finn: Oh, the Irony of Society!

Huck Finn: Oh, the Irony of Society! Satire is a subtle literary technique involving the criticism of human idiocy through scorn and biting irony. With a façade of crude bias and prejudice, satire's influence lies in the reader's capability of interpretation. Due to Mark Twain's constant application of racial aspersions, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains strong implications of an archetypal racist novel. However, with satirical insight and the shrewd application of realism and irony, the novel reveals itself to hold an opposing stance through its harsh ridicule of white society. Utilizing a sense of realism for the setting for his novel, Twain correctly portrays historical accuracy in the perspective of white society through the prejudice he presents. Twain attempts to instill a sense of authenticity in his readers while indistinctly instilling novel concepts that grow stronger and undeniable by the novel's conclusion. For example, when Aunt Sally hears of a steamboat explosion: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?" "No'm. Killed a nigger." "Well, that's lucky, because sometimes people get hurt, "(167). Almost laughable in its absurdity, this quote portrays whites in a callous light, revealing their disdain for black lives. Aunt Sally is a respected figure in white society, not an outcast like Pap or the King and the Duke. Yet her judgment is no better than Pap's

  • Word count: 0
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain discusses facets of past southern society, namely slavery and racism.

ESSAY ON HUCKLEBERRY FINN In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain discusses facets of past southern society, namely slavery and racism. By writing in the first person through the eyes of a boy of the south, the reader can see a first-hand view of life in the south. In the novel, there are several instances where the main character, Huckleberry Finn, personify Twain's view of the flaws of white society. Through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn, Twain develops his thoughts of past society and its endorsement of slavery and the oppression of an entire race. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain significantly develops his views of slavery and racism in his analysis of southern white society. "The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out." (Page 1). A reader who is not aware of the rest of the book would likely take this for a relatively innocuous statement, as it simply states that Huck did not enjoy living in a "sivilized" environment; that is, one in which he wore nice, clean clothes and slept in a bed. However, as Twain makes additional references to other aspects of white society, this statement is the first sign of Huck's breaking away

  • Word count: 1341
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Huck finn hero or villian?

Originally developed in Spain, one of the various styles of writing used by authors is that of the picaresque novel, which involves a picaro, or rogue hero, usually on a journey, and incorporates an episodic plot through various conflicts. Mark Twain's novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (AHF), is a picaresque novel, marked by its episodic plot with a unifying theme of the river and the characterization of Huck Finn as a rogue hero. The novel's periodic plot is demonstrated by Huck's many adventures in separate episodes having independent conflicts. Gary Weiner, a former English teacher, states that "the picaresque novel is [...] episodic. Various scenes may have little to do with one another, and entire scenes may be removed without markedly altering the plot as a whole" (88). The conflicts that govern Huck's encounters with people like the dishonest and devious king and the duke, the Grangerford family, or Colonel Sherburn are very different and disconnected from one another. Whereas one episode involves two crooks, the duke and the king, the other involves a long-standing family feud between the Grangerford and Sheperdson families, and the third involves a Colonel defending his honor, with very little connection among the episodes. Tom Quirk, an author, editor, and English professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, also purports that "Huckleberry Finn is a

  • Word count: 1858
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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The use of Satire in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

André Malan The use of Satire in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Word Count (873) In his novel the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, Mark Twain uses satire frequently as a medium to display his feelings on a range of issues related to society at that time. Throughout the book he ridicules many aspects of society, including the prevalent views on slaves and religion, and their social structure. Even though the novel was set fifty years before it was published, the themes still held true for contemporary society. This led to the novel being criticised widely as a result of it condemning the very society it was presented to. Today however readers can see the message behind Mark Twain's satire much more clearly, as it does not mock us personally but rather a society that we have evolved from and tend to deride ourselves. Mark Twain was deeply opposed to slavery, yet he does not openly display his views in the novel. Instead he uses the subtlety of satire to bring his message across. In a time where the life of a slave was considered worthless, Twain used Jim to show us otherwise. Society considered slaves as possessions with no value other than that of money. However, as soon as Jim is free, he is rich. "I owns myself, en I's worth eight hund'd dollars." (100). This shows us that even though society considered the lives of slaves worthless, the monetary

  • Word count: 892
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Many critics have made attempts to discredit "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by pointing to its final episode-where Tom Sawyer reappears and masterminds Jim's escape plan from prison.

Many critics have made attempts to discredit "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by pointing to its final episode-where Tom Sawyer reappears and masterminds Jim's escape plan from prison. They have called this episode "irrelevant"(Young 200-201) and a "flimsy"(Marx 426,430) contrivance, a serious "anticlimax"(Van O'Connor 6.) Only T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling have tried to defend the pattern of the novel. Both present weak arguments. Eliot feels the end of the book rounds off the story and brings the reader back to the level of childish, boyish beginning, while Trilling sees the close of the novel as a device, which permits Huck to fall back into the anonymity he prefers. I suggest that Mark Twain had a very definite plan in the final episode, which depends on repetitions and variations of themes presented earlier in the novel. His primary objective in the "fatal" last chapters is to ridicule, in the manner of Don Quixote, the romantic tradition as exemplified by Tom Sawyer, who lacks character and is full of purposeless fun; and to win final sympathy for the realistic tradition and its hero, Huck, who has achieved a sense of responsibility and a meaningful vision of life. In "Life on the Mississippi", Mark Twain had already suggested his deep concern with the unwholesome effects of Romanticism: "A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is

  • Word count: 2046
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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Development of Jim in Huckleberry Finn

Parker Hollander Ms. Carter American Literature “The Character of Jim and the Ending of ‘Huckleberry Finn’” This article demonstrates the different phases of Jim’s development to show how Twain used him as a tool to condemn mistreatment of black people. The author begins with the analysis of Jim as a simple gag routine which was a common role of African Americans during this time period. However, Twain slowly makes the audience realize that the Jim is a real person, beginning with a profound statement of self-awareness and destiny “Jim's reflection that ‘I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I `wouldn' want no mo'’ moves outside the world of low comedy, and Jim becomes something more than the ordinary stage Negro.” By this point in the book, the reader begins to realize, along with an unwilling Huck, that Jim is an intelligent and respectable man, equal with any white of the South. Jim’s continuing demonstration of intellectuality and compassion lead the reader to believe that he is the only true “adult” or “human” person in the novel while acting as a foil to the emotionally young and adamant Huck. Eventually, the reader is lead to sympathize and relate to Jim while he takes on the traditional role of a “white man” and Huck that of a “black man”, evidence of

  • Word count: 617
  • Level: AS and A Level
  • Subject: English
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