The contradictory forces that influenced huck’s personality in the early chapters of mark twain’s adventures of huckleberry finn

While a child’s personality is not only affected by the way he is raised, parents or tutors do have significant influence on their children’s values. At a very young age, kids learn from their eldersthe concept of right and wrong, the way one should behave in public, and even how to speak in a certain way. It all comes down to following examples and having role models. Then, what exactly happenswhen a child is raised by so many persons, with so various ideals that it becomes difficult for him to emulate just one? That is exactly what happens to Huck, the main character of Mark Twain’sAdventures of Huckleberry Finn. Growing up in an unstable environment and being raised by so many different people, he did not have a fixed adult role model to look up to. The forces that influenced Huck’schildhood were all so different that they contradicted one another; because of that he ended up by combining them all and creating his own rules, based on whichever of the learned ideals he thoughtmade more sense.
Being just a kid, Huck finds himself surrounded with contradictory ideas about what kind of boy he should be. On one side there is the Widow Douglas, a wealthy woman who adopted him,and as Huck himself describes it “…would sivilize me” (1). She was Christian and tried very hard to implement her Christian ideals on Huckleberry, who did not find any logic in them. Huck was raisedby his alcoholic father without any sort of religious values. When he came to this new house where he was expected to believe in certain things and follow numerous rules, ambiguity and confusion beganto build up in his mind. As if the guidance Huck got from his father and the Widow were not contradictory enough, he also had to deal with influences from Jim, the Widow’s slave who was verysuperstitious. While Huckleberry despised most of Jim’s superstitions, some of them did persuade him and were another big contradicting force in his childhood.
Having a mixture between the “civilization”...