Examples Of The Hero's Journey In Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn and his Hero’s Journey

In the story The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the protagonist, Huck Finn, abandons his civilized life and ventures through the Mississippi River where he experiences a spontaneous adventure parallel to a hero’s journey. Throughout Huck’s adventure he struggles to overcome many tests of his character. In some cases Huck experiences dilemmas where he must choose to follow the example society has laid out for him or to follow his own virtues. Huck’s adventure significantly relates to a hero’s journey because he is exposed to the same stages and events a hero would.
Huck initiates the departure phase of a hero’s journey, “the hero leaves his comfortable and familiar world and ventures

Jim then ends up in New Orleans on a farm owned by Silas Phelps. Huck, trying to be the helpful, brainstorms a plan to better Jim’s life. As Huck goes through this process, he becomes the epiphany of Confucius’s character quote; “Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license” (ReligFacts.com). At first Huck delineates a plan to write a letter to Jim’s former slave owner, Miss Watson, and tell her where Jim was. But he concluded that Miss Watson would probably have been angry with Jim and sell him off into slavery, so he decided not to. The letter to Miss Watson is related to Confucius’s excess of words because Huck refuses to send it because it wouldn’t better Jim’s life. Huck then begins to reflect on his past actions and how in the site of God he had been committing works of evil. “I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm” (Twain, 213). He tried to reconcile so he kneeled down and tried to