Character analysis for the character Jim in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Jim is portrayed as the black slave of Miss Watson. Believing that he is about to be sold down the river for eight hundred dollars, he runs away and hides on Jackson's Island, where Huck also takes refuge after faking his own murder in order to escape from Pap. Ignorant, superstitious, gullible, Jim is nevertheless, in Huck's words, “most always right; he had an uncommon level head, for a nigger.” (Twain, 6)

He will laugh at everything comical, but he suffers poignantly when he thinks of the family he has left in bondage. He protects Huck physically and emotionally, feeling that the boy is the one white person he can trust, never suspecting that Huck is struggling with his conscience about whether to turn Jim in. When the two companions encounter the King and the Duke, Jim is completely taken in by their fakery, though at one point he asks, “Don't it sprise you, de way dem kings carries on, Huck?” Typically, Jim is subservient to and patient with whites. Even when Tom Sawyer arrives at the Phelpses, where Jim has been caught and held, he goes through Tom's complicated and romantic ritual of escape with grumbling good nature. Jim is a sensitive, sincere man who seems to play his half-comic, half-tragic role in life because he is supposed to play it that way (Twain, 7).

Jim—ignorant, superstitious, and timid but loyal and devoted to Huck—has, on the long trip down the river, shown over and over that he is a man of considerable character, despite his color and despite his disadvantaged life as a slave. Huck, in turn, discovers that however much he tries to distinguish Jim as other than an equal, however much he is bothered ...