Little Boys In Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Words: 850
Pages: 4

“Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails, that's what little boys are made of,” goes the well loved nursery rhyme. This nursery rhyme creates an accurate metal image of the stereotypical boys and their goofy, outdoorsy, mischievous personalities. Perhaps Mark Twain recognized this attribute in little boys and that is why he used them as his main characters in his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Despite the fact that this is a humorous book about little boys, Mark Twain presents many controversial themes such as racism, law, and religion. Mark Twain presents debatable issues in his book, but he is able to avoid conflict with his readers by using young boys as his main characters in his book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He …show more content…
At the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and some of his friends create a gang with each other. “‘Now we’ll start this gang of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer’s gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.’… It [oath] swore everybody to stick to the band, and never to tell any of the secrets… and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn’t eat and he mustn’t sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breast, which was the sign of the band” (197,198). The band these boys made was intense, if Mark Twain had used little girls, readers would be worried, nervous, and offended for girls. If he used grown men, people would be offended because they were not acting responsible, and fighting with each other. Woman would not be fit for sailing down the river, and living the perilous nomadic life these young boys were living. Young boys do silly and ridiculous things; it is not hard to imagine a boy around the age of fourteen going out and embarking on the adventure Huckleberry Finn did, but people would not be as quick to read about a girl in that kind of