Huckleberry Finn Character Analysis

Here’s a question to ponder: what is the most well known, yet under-analyzed feature of a character? While the question has multiple right answers, for the sake of this paper, the answer to this question is a character’s name. To many readers’ surprise, a name is not just a character’s label; there is some notable significance to each one. To list a few examples, “Vader” is the German word for father, making the end of the fifth Star Wars movie no surprise to those who knew. Tom Marvolo Riddle from Harry Potter is the scrambled name to “Lord Voldemort,” and Percy Jackson of the Percy Jackson series is analogous to the Greek hero Perseus. After reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the unique names encourage the reader to investigate
When told to analyze the character Huckleberry Finn, critical readers will make it their primary goal to look beyond face value and offer a dynamic account of him. Yet, the name alone can reveal so much about Huckleberry Finn. His nickname, “Huck” throws himself into Tom’s shenanigans. When Tom and his friend Joe Harper went sailing to St. Jackson’s Island, Huck mindlessly “joined them promptly, for all careers were one to him; he was indifferent” (Twain 13). The remark about Huck’s indifference indicates his willingness to follow Tom how Huck idolizes him and is willing to do whatever it takes in order to keep their friendship, no matter how dangerous or how silly the situation gets. Tom ends up using this to his advantage, however, when he threatens Huck to throw him out of his gang, reasoning that the gang would have “pretty low characters in it! They’d mean you, Huck”(Twain 35). This emphasizes Huck’s last name, Finn. The last name “Finn,” is like the fin of an animal such as a fish or shark, indicating that he is imperative to the host’s or Tom’s survival, yet not the most important character of the novel. When Tom asserts this position onto Huck, it forces him to believe that
Readers can foreshadow this cruelty by examining the components of his name. The word “Injun” is an offensive term to describe Native Americans, painting them as savages who hunt for the sake of murder. The term “Injun” is very similar to the word “Injure,” which is why this name falsely describes Native Americans as people who seek to injure others. The word “Joe” indicates that he is a normal human, much like “an average Joe.” The two names juxtapose each other, and Twain makes good use of this by consistently referring to Joe as a “half-breed” throughout the novel. This portrays Joe as inhumane, as many evil characters are, by weakening his humanity with the term “half-breed” to remind the reader that he is not human and that he does not deserve any human sympathy. He thinks that he can justify his behavior by holding the blood that shows the savagery of Native Americans. Before he murdered Doctor Robinson, Joe reasoned that “The Injun blood ain’t in me for nothing”(Twain 9). It is fair to imply that the “Injun blood,” he believes, empowers him to make him physically stronger, but his moral character as a thief and murderer detract from this, making him the pathetic antagonist so crucial to this