"We was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitos would let us - the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't do much on clothes no how." These words escaped the mouth of Huck, a character portrayed throughout Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck expresses the life that he and Jim, a runaway slave, experienced on the raft that was drifting them toward freedom. Throughout the novel, Huck encounters the diversity of his life on land with Pap to his lifestyle with Jim down the river. The cruelty and racism on land compared to the freewill devised by life on the raft are the thematic differences that create those two lifestyles.
Living with Pap, Huck encounters ruthless beatings and endless embarrassment. He becomes comfortable with this lifestyle, feeling that it is better to be beaten and live with Pap than to be conforming and live with Miss Watson. However, after spending time with Jim on the raft, he realizes that the cruelty he encounters on land can be escaped. While with Jim, good laughs and in-depth conversations consume almost every day, creating a loving and respectable environment. Yet, Huck still comes across the hate portrayed by the Townspeople. Huck witnesses how they ridiculed Boggs, the town drunk, until he was actually shot and killed in front of his own daughter. They also had no regard toward Boggs" safety while he was drunk on the horse. Huck was bothered by this and expressed so by saying, "the minute he was on, the horse began to rip and tear and jump and cavort around.it warn't funny to me though. I was all of a .
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tremble to see his danger." Throughout his journey on the raft with Jim, Huck has learned to care for others and not to clone the cruel personalities that society sets forth.
Being exposed to racism and slavery all his life, Huck learned that blacks and whites were not created equally.