Mob Mentality in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Passion around a subject can easily stir up a heated crowd. One action or word can cause a group to take up arms against the rival party. The collective opposition can lead to inhumane actions, violence, and the skewing of one’s moral compass. In the 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses the mob scenes to convey the difficulties of maintaining one’s individual views when confronted with a majority and how one should attempt to resist conforming to others.
Whipped into a frenzy, people dehumanize themselves and return to their primal barbaric ways. Twain satirizes mobs and shows how inhumane they become when they attack another person, the bloodlust and frenzy causing them to lose their inhibitions. Furthermore, by throwing out one’s social institutions in favor of following a mislead individual, one shows how easily one can brush off logic and reason. Reason and the ability to assess a situation based upon one’s principles, sets humans apart from other animals. However, when people give into the sway of the mob they abandon that which makes them superior beings and demote
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Twain displays irony in the mob with Sherburn’s outburst, showing how people originally entered the mob in order to avoid appearing a coward, when in reality joining the violent crowd makes them a coward unable to oppose the majority: “afraid you’ll be found out what you are--cowards”(162). One should resist the urge to hide in the mass and instead proudly display their beliefs even if they oppose the others. When Sherburn calls out the crowd as cowards and takes a stand against the mass, they do not see him as a coward, for someone who can withstand the mob’s force has earned respect. In order to not appear lowly and weak one should not join the frenzy but keep composed and stay true to one’s own