Book Report on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

As Wang Xiao－bo said in the introduction of Running in the Night，“What the book talks about is interest, after all, every book should be interesting. To some books, interest is the reason for existence, for others, interest is the standard that they are trying to reach. We need to remember Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn in the age where people trend to forget what is interest.

I remember Huck’s lies, tricks that he played on others and the mixture of good and evil, full of Children's naiveness and fun. He said that you would be yourself after a while instead of being in a very melancholy spirit for a long time. Although he led a homeless life, he still had the most pure heart，without hypocrisy. In a stormy night, Heck enjoyed looking at the isolated  island which was lit up by thunder and lightning and leaves dangled in the wind，then  went back to peaceful sleep.

The result of interest must be happiness. However, Heck was not always happy. When he faced Jim, he was sometimes anguished.On the one hand, he was moved by Jim’s loyalty and friendship. On the other, it was unethical of him to help Jim run away. Many people were adamant that Heck was a bad boy and regarded his actions as deplorable.

Was Heck bad? Not bad at all, for morality is not always good. In 19th century, old Puritan notion gained great popularity in America, which brought a lot of moral requirements at the same time. Heck could not put up with rules and regulations. The badness in Heck was more like a liberation, a pursuit of the true condition of life and happiness.

An interesting man is happy and a happy man is bond to be interesting. If  the standard  of life became interest and happiness, people would do things according to their own understanding of good or bad, not the standard set up by society. And the latter was what we called morality. Instead of feeling guilty to help Jim obtain freedom, Heck considered that morality was not necessarily good. I suppose that was also what Mark Twain wanted to tell us: Morality is not necessarily better than interest.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. In the ending of the story, Tom helped Heck to rescue Jim from the black room. However, Tom insisted that they act according to the typical procedure of escaping from prison, which he called adventure. After suffered from all kinds of torture, Jim regained his freedom.

What is more interesting than interest is the absurdity. Children are absurd. They behave according to what they learn from books just for fun.  Adults are absurd. They are easy to be influenced by outside world. They sometimes intend to show off and fill the emptiness inside. If  so, real life world is far more absurd than fictions. Fictions sometimes are more real than our life, which reveal the essence through digging past lustrous and dazzling appearances.