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Uncle Tom's Cabin Essay

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Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1852, is debatably one of the most influential books in American history. While conflict between the north and south had been growing for years, some believe that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin began the war. It has been reported that Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in the white house saying “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin depicts the horrible effects of slavery and provides an ever-lingering call to end it. Throughout the whole book, Stowe captures the reader with truth of slavery and gives challenging insight and ideas to the country at that time.

To begin, Uncle Tom's Cabin takes place for the most part in the American south, also in Canada at the end of the book, during the mid 1800s. The point of view in Uncle Tom's Cabin is third and sometimes second person omniscient, the narrator often goes into the mind of a character to help the audience sympathize with them. The main protagonist is Tom, Tom is a slave from Kentucky, he is in the words of his first master, “Steady, honest [and] capable” (pg …show more content…

At the end of the book George Shelby frees all his slaves and tells them, “Think of your freedom, every time you see Uncle Tom's Cabin; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be honest and faithful and christian as he was.”(pg 500). Tom's cabin is a symbol of the cataclysmic power of slavery and the almighty power of christian love. Another symbol is shown when Eliza leaps across the partly frozen Ohio river, from the south side to the bank of the north, with her son while being persuaded by slave catchers. Eliza's leap symbolizes the great risk and hardships of escaping from slavery to freedom. Tom's sacrificial death and Christlike attitude make him the Christ figure in the novel, and his death specifically represents Jesus's death on the

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