Essay On Superstition In Huckleberry Finn

Reading this Essay May Give You Bad Luck

Mark Twain uses Superstition in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to show how uneducated Huck and Jim are. Huck is uneducated because he is still a child, and Jim is uneducated because he is a slave. Huck is Superstitious because he doesn’t believe in religion, where as Jim is superstitious because he doesn’t know any better. Three superstitious symbols throughout the novel are the spider, the hairball, and the birds. All of these symbols changed the characters action throughout the novel. The first superstitious event is towards the beginning of the novel, when a spider is crawling up Huck’s shoulder. He flipped it off and it landed in a candle, shriveling up before Huck could save it. After Huck accidentally killed the spider, he immediately thought to himself, “I didn’t need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad

After Huck sees Pap’s footprints in the snow, he immediately remembers that “Jim had a hair-ball as big as a fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything”(29). This quote shows how uneducated and superstitious both Huck and Jim are about using a hair-ball to tell the future. Jim, showing his undeveloped mind set, makes up what the hair ball says giving an answer that is very general. This hair-ball event also has a good use of satire in it because the hairball needs money to “talk” to Jim. As the reader, we know that Jim is scamming Huck into giving him money, but there is a sense that Jim and Huck do both really believe in the hair-ball. Then, Jim is “told” the answers to Huck's question from the hair-ball and the answer Jim gives is so general that Jim could have done anything and the answer would have still been slightly