In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain explores the journey of a runaway boy escaping his father, and a runaway slave-both of who are from the same town in the American south during the early 1800s. As they travel down the Mississippi River the two friends encounter multiple mishaps and a variety of characters as they attempt to reach their ultimate goal: to get Jim to free territory. Twain is vitally concerned about the evolving relationship between the pair. Quite often, Tom Sawyer, a game master and imaginary thinker, is brought into the story and his childish games are commonly played out or alluded to (“what would Tom Sawyer do?”). This is particularly evident in the part of the novel when Tom is scheming up an extensive plan to place a stolen grindstone in the shed where Jim is being held captive at the Phelp’s farm. Twain uses the expectation of one’s gratefulness to criticize the flaws of the ownership of another person.
When Tom Sawyer is stirring up an elaborate plan to free Jim, most of his methods are absurd, and unnecessary. He asks Jim if there are any animals in his prison room finishing hiding the grindstone in Jim’s room. He speaks of
He says that taming an animal is “easy enough,” because “every animal is grateful” and that information would be in “any book” (261). To Tom, taming an animal is common knowledge to an average person. But on the other hand, ordinarily taming an animal is complex task that takes a great amount of time and patience. Tom is simplifying something that is more involved than it might appear to be at the surface: training an animal that cannot communicate effectively with a person. Tom makes it seem like people should have the expectation that animals should already be tamed to an extent in the wild that when they interact with humans for the first time it would be “easy enough” to tame