An Adventure of Solidarity:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Freedom
by Elif Yaren Candan

Mark Twain’s famous novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deals with two forms of discrimination regarding people from different lives and living conditions. People tend to discriminate against the ones that are different from the majority of their society and subject them to various exclusions and inequalities. This time, such discrimination is directed to two separate people: a white child and a black slave. Even though there were some states that prohibited slavery of any kind, Missouri, the state Huckleberry Finn and Jim live allowed its citizens to have slaves as property. To start with, Huckleberry Finn who gives his name to the novel, is a total outcast. He is a child with no parents to look after him, educate him, and guarantee him a place in a respectable society there. Indeed, he has a father who has been away and lost which is better for Huckleberry since the father swims in the sea of alcohol. No child deserves to have a father like this drunken man who claims the “property” of his son. Pap Finn has nothing to offer to his son like a proper parent; instead, he kidnaps his son from those people who may look after Huckleberry properly and physically and verbally abuses him in a cabin where Huckleberry is captivated. It does not matter whether Pap is his father or not since no one has to right to kidnap someone and torture them. Huckleberry Finn is not only a victim of physical abuse but also, he is definitely abused emotionally and psychologically. For a child at his age, the love and care of parents are needed, yet unfortunately, what he gets is nothing similar to love and care. What brings the other outsider of the novel, Jim, is the compensation for Huck’s need for love and care. Jim, the slave of the Widow Douglas, comes across with Huck while they both try to run away from their captivity. In the society they live in, there are two definitions of slavery: one is being a slave in the house and the other one is being a slave in the plantation houses. Quite ironically, Jim is among the lucky ones since he has been in the house but overhears that he will be sold to a plantation house-holder. Only having the chance to compare these two kinds of living and thinking that one is better than the other while they can be as free as the other members of the society, Jim has no other choice but to run away from the house to the states where slavery is prohibited. Both being titled as property by the ones who “own” them, Huckleberry Finn and Jim take on an adventure in which they get to know and sympathize with each other. Wherever they go, they are announced as wanted by their guardians but the adventure they embark on brings them the freedom and mutual empathy they crave for. Bringing two different people together in search of freedom, the novel suggests the necessity of a society in which every person should be free and live a life as they like.