"You mean where's Huck Finn--that's what you mean!"

Upon the completion of the novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I was a bit miffed by what had taken place throughout the novel. Huckleberry Finn begins his life growing up with an alcoholic father who is never around and his mother is never mentioned. He’s independent and intelligent and unlike his friend, Tom Sawyer, he has a better understanding between what is reality and what is imagination. However, I wasn’t quite sure who exactly Huck Finn was. In the beginning of the novel, he’s living with Miss Watson, a woman who begins to civilize Huck into a “…sweet scented dandy…” Huck also spends a majority of his time with Tom and the crew making blood pacts to start a gang. During this “outings” Huck has a steady head on his shoulders even though Tom insists that they are fighting wars and stealing money. Where I start to get confused about Huck is when he plants his own death and runs away. He creates a pretty realistic scene at the place of his “murder” however it’s a characteristic more like Tom than Huck for creating a murder scene; why didn’t he just runaway instead of creating such a mess? Throughout his entire time down river, he lives the adventures Tom was always reading about and making up with his imagination. He helps a runaway slave making him an outlaw and he befriends two con-men who steal money from town to town. The one scene in the novel that caught my attention the most however was when Huck stumbled across Tom’s family. Instead of admitting who he really was, a friend of Tom, he takes on Tom’s name and ultimately becomes Tom until Aunt Polly arrives and sets the situation straight. From early one, Huck is greatly influenced by Tom. While down river, Huck can’t help but think, “what would Tom do?” I sometimes wonder if Tom and Huck are the same character. They may be two different people, but Mark Twain intertwines the two characters throughout the novel in ways that makes me think maybe Huck and Tom are the same character and that Huck’s adventures are that of Tom’s imagination. I don’t know, it’s just a thought.