Tom and Huck, Comparing and Contrasting

In “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” Tom’s best friend is a homeless kid named Huckleberry Finn, and they are extremely similar. They are both adventurous, and love playing at being outlaws or pirates, but Huck doesn’t go to school, being homeless, and thus doesn’t know what several things are, requiring Tom to define several words for him, which is nice if the reader doesn’t know a word. While he is somewhat jealous of Tom knowing how to read, or knowing about stories like, say, Robin Hood (whom Huck didn’t know about until Tom told him) he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth it when (spoiler alert) at the end of the book he was adopted by the Widow Douglas, since he ran away after three weeks of “suffering” and only came back when Tom said he had to be respectable if he was going to join his (Tom’s) bandit camp.

Huckleberry also seems to be much more content than Tom, at least when he was homeless, because he was always just wandering around living off scraps until Thomas comes up with an idea like treasure hunting or pirating, and once he hears the idea he’s all for it. This contentedness seems to fade once he gets adopted by the Widow, so it could just be that he didn’t have ideas for adventures because he lived a much free-er life that didn’t need breaks in the monotony.

I can’t tell if Huckleberry is more superstitious than Tom or if he just thinks about it more, because he’s often in the middle of some ritual or “spell” such as throwing a dead cat in a graveyard to get rid of blisters, but Tom also does this sort of thing occasionally, and while Huck is the first to point out the fact that Injun Joe’s ghost might be guarding his treasure, Tom seems to be equally afraid once he realizes. Tom then pointed out that there was a cross in the room, rendering the ghosts powers null, so they skipped over that subject a bit.

Overall I believe Tom a Huck to be very similar, the only real differences being caused by the fact that Huck grew up with a great deal more freedom and was raised in comparative isolation.