What Is The Theme Of Empathy In Huckleberry Finn

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Huckleberry Finn is a young kid who has good intentions with most of his bad actions. He never really thinks about the consequences of his actions. In this novel he is shown as becoming more empathetic to those that he cares about, but when he gets caught back up in Tom’s schemes that empathy seems to go away. Huck is heavily influenced by the people that he looks up to, that is why Tom can also get him to follow his plans. In Chapter 7 Huck fakes his own death to get away from Pap, his father. He staged it out so that it looked like Pap may have killed him. While he was staging his death he was only thinking about how it would be good for him instead of thinking about how that would affect those that loved him and took care of him like Widow …show more content…
He begins thinking of himself and Jim as one and thinking about how his actions will affect the both of them. Although, starting in Chapter 37 Huck begins going back to his old ways when he is trying to break Jim out of slavery. Tom is brought back into the story and together Tom and Huck attempt to execute a ridiculous plan when they could have just unlocked the shed and let Jim out. When Jim first gets sold into slavery again Huck isn’t thinking about Jim he is thinking about the “two hundred dollars’ reward on him. It’s like picking money out’n the road” (Page 211). You can see that Huck loses his sympathy for how this is changing Jim’s life but is instead is debating giving Jim up for the 200 dollars. It is clear that Huckleberry Finn doesn’t mean to hurt the people around him, it is just in his nature to mess around with people and not think about the repercussions. When he is with Jim he starts to learn how he should be treating people because of how kind Jim is to him even after he has hurt and scared him. This all starts to go away when he runs back into Tom and they start hanging out with each other again. They are a bad influence on each other because their plans aren’t small and meaningless anymore, now people are starting to get hurt because of

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