Why is the author using a river as a main part for his novel? Is he just an admirer of nature, or is he symbolizing something with it? In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, the main character Huck, a ten year old kid and his friend, the runaway nigger Jim, escape from civilization and slavery , by taking a raft down the Mississippi River. But their adventures always end at one place, where they feel save and free : the river! Mark Twain uses the river as a symbol that provides a place of refuge, peace and sanity for Huck. For example when Huck watches the towns people searching for him, when he finds Jim at Jackson Island and when they escape from the Grangerfords and Sheperdsons feud.
             The main symbol, the river, shows first freedom. After Huck escaped from civilization and the domination of his drunkard father, he waits to see if the plan he made up in order to stay released from his past forever, would work. "I hoppen up, and went and looked out at the hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long ways up - about abreas the ferry. And there was the ferryboat full of people floating along down. I knowed what was the matter now. 'Boom!' I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat's side. You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my carcass come to the top. I was pretty hungry, but it waren't going to do for me to start a fire , because they might see the smoke. So I set there and watched the cannon-smoke and listened to the boom. The river was a mile wide there , and it always looker pretty on a summer morning-so I was having a good enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders; If I only had a bite to eat" (Twain 37).Huck is feeling mighty happy being away from the people try to tell him how to behave and be, even though it makes him starve, since he can't make a fire to cook
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