River of Life and Realism in Huck Finn In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses the river to symbolize life and the adventures of Huck to show the realism in the novel. These two elements are shown throughout the book in many different ways. Sometimes one would have to really sit down and think about all the symbolism in this classic novel. T. S. Eliot stated, “We come to understand the River by seeing it through the eyes of the Boy; but the Boy is also the spirit of the River” (333). Throughout Huck’s adventure, as he and Jim are traveling down the river on a raft to Cairo, we see the admiration Huck has fo