Huck Finn & Catcher in the Rye Compare/Contrast

             The books The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, there many themes that collide throughout these two books. Although these two books are different their themes are closely related. Such as the racism vs. phoniness that are portrayed, also the education vs. growing up, and self-protection vs. the civilized society are all themes that the two authors bring up.
             Mark Twain describes the racism in Huck Finn easily. Not because he liked racism but because Twain grew up believing that racism and slavery were not bad things. The book Huck Finn was written after the civil war so things were still cooling down from the war. At the time slavery and racism were being fought everybody owned slaves so it wasn't uncommon to hear the word, "nigger" or other racial terms. Twain wrote this book from the eyes of an innocent boy, Huck, and Twain uses Huck to get his message across that slavery is a bad thing and that we need to change. Huck grew up and was use to slavery and racism, like Twain, but he didn't know that they were bad things because of the way he was brought up that way.
             Whereas the phoniness in the Catcher in the Rye was only Holden Cawfields thoughts of people of which he encountered. It was easy for Holden to portray everybody as phony because nobody lived up to what he portrayed to be perfect, and it wasn't hard for Huck to see black people as slaves and "niggers." The word phony in the book Catcher was described as a bad taste, insincerity, affectation and the shallowness that Holden encounters in the world around him. So does Huck but Huck was brought up believing that racism and slavery was a good thing and that he would " go to hell" if he was to abolish what he had been taught.
             Two main similarities in the books Catcher and Huck Finn is the education vs. growing up. The education of Hu
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