Adventure, Travel, and Home for Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn has been forced to deal with the inevitable adaptation to the change in his immediate environment. He has gone from the "sivilized" confines of Miss Watson's orderly home, to his father's drunken abode where Huck often finds himself being unjustly abused. Another interesting environment that Huck often involves himself in his his gang of robbers, who often talk about performing some adventuresome expedition in addition to some serious crimes. I believe that although he does not physically travel far, the extent to which his environments contrast each other is great. These environmental disparities seem to cause a nonphysical distance between each location that he travels to and from over the course of his day-to-day life. Relating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Homer's epic tale of the great ancient Greek figure Odysseus in The Odyssey, one will notice that the theme of travel is one that appears in both. However, while Odysseus has his eyes fixed on a predefined destination that he calls home (Ithaca), Huck's sense of home seems to constantly changing. When Huck's father takes him away from the widow that has been taking care of him, his sense of home changes to stay with his father. "...and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's...I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objections." (Mark Twain 34).