<P> Jim, a runaway slave whom Huck befriends, is another dominant force in Huck's life . He is the symbol for the moral awakening Huck undergoes throughout Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . This is seen when Huck considers sending a letter to Ms. Watson telling her where Jim is but ultimately chooses to rip it up despite the idea in the south that one who tries helping a slave escape will be sent to eternal punishment . </P> <P> Pap Finn is Huck's abusive, drunken father who shows up at the beginning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and forcibly takes his son to live with him . Pap's only method of parenting is physical abuse . Although he seems derisive of education and civilized living, Pap seems to be jealous of Huck and is infuriated that his son would try to amount to more, and live in better conditions than he did . Despite this, early in the novel Huck uses his father's method of "borrowing" though he later feels sorry and stops . </P> <P> The character of Huck Finn is based on Tom Blankenship, the real - life son of a sawmill laborer and sometime drunkard named Woodson Blankenship, who lived in a "ramshackle" house near the Mississippi River behind the house where the author grew up in Hannibal, Missouri . The father of Huck, called "Pap" Finn, may be based on Jimmy Finn, a full - blown alcoholic who lived on the streets, and it is only through Twain's remembrances that Woodson is characterized as a drunkard . Twain left Hannibal and his boyhood at an early age and his memories of these people are colored by what he could have known and understood at the time, as a boy of less than 14 years old . Twain's friend Tom Blankenship didn't attend school because there were no public schools at the time, and his family was too poor to send him to a private school . Left at loose ends in a busy household with six sisters and lacking a mother who seems to have died when he was young, this Tom was indeed "at liberty" most of the time . </P> <P> Twain mentions his childhood friend Tom Blankenship as the inspiration for creating Huckleberry Finn in his autobiography: "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was . He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had . His liberties were totally unrestricted . He was the only really independent person--boy or man--in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us . And as his society was forbidden us by our parents the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boy's ."--Mark Twain's Autobiography . </P>

Who is the character huck finn based on