For example, one can look at Huckleberry Finn’s simplistic explanation of prayer and morality.
“And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
The words he uses are simple, and deceptively so, while they expose much greater and complex issues. At the heart of Huck’s dilemma is the moral correctness in either helping a runaway slave escape or taking him back to his “rightful owner”. Ultimately, Huck decides,
“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell" and tears up the note he had written for Miss. Watson.
The credibility of a child’s voice as a narrator lies, according to Claire King, “... in laying …show more content…
When it comes to the intangible, Elizabeth Baines writes, “Children can have instinctual knowledge which we adults can lose, and these insights yet gaps can be the stuff of dramatic conflict and motor a story”. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Huck Finn can be described as a fairly neutral character who despite his limited perception and cognitive ability is unmarked by the racial prejudice that the majority of the adult characters in the book seem to have succumbed
“And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
The words he uses are simple, and deceptively so, while they expose much greater and complex issues. At the heart of Huck’s dilemma is the moral correctness in either helping a runaway slave escape or taking him back to his “rightful owner”. Ultimately, Huck decides,
“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell" and tears up the note he had written for Miss. Watson.
The credibility of a child’s voice as a narrator lies, according to Claire King, “... in laying …show more content…
When it comes to the intangible, Elizabeth Baines writes, “Children can have instinctual knowledge which we adults can lose, and these insights yet gaps can be the stuff of dramatic conflict and motor a story”. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Huck Finn can be described as a fairly neutral character who despite his limited perception and cognitive ability is unmarked by the racial prejudice that the majority of the adult characters in the book seem to have succumbed