The Maturation of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with Huck introducing himself. He is wild and carefree, playing jokes on people and believing them all to be hilarious. When his adventures grow to involve new moral questions never before raised, there is a drastic change in his opinions, thoughts, and his views of "right and wrong", and Huck's "rejection of the values of society has tried to instill in him" (Wright 154). By the time the book is …

…At the beginning of the book, Huck is a rowdy, young, southern boy who has very little respect for slaves and has an "immortality of youth" way of thinking. By the end of the book, Huck respects slaves because of his friendship with Jim, he realizes how fragile life is because of his brushes with death, gains many moral values, and it is apparent that he has matured greatly since the beginning of the novel.