Twain: Huck Finn (16-30)

Huck Finn: Twain

Section 2 (Chapters 16-30)

Okay, after reading all this… all I want to say is… WHAT?  To sum up everything… they meet these two con artists and the next few chapters are them taking over revivals and working at a printer store? So I had to keep telling myself that this is the “adventure” part of the book. This is actually a sad section of the novel because it shows how ridiculous the American society was during this time and also how naïve people are.

Huck and Jim get separated for a little while and poor Jim is left to fin for himself while Huck is living at the Grangerford house.  Then it jumps to another scene where they meet the “Duke” and “Dauphin” who are the con artists. So basically, this is where I wish I could instant message Twain and ask him okay, what? Haha, He threw me off here.  Honestly from this chapter on I didn’t really enjoy the book that much.  Partially because Huck gets theatrical with his descriptions, but these two men just start running things in a bad way. I want to tell Huck and Jim to get away quickly because these bad men are going to get caught up with. Especially when the men take over the revival and get all that money from those people. It just shows the joke in which Religion is to Twain. Like we’ve read in other stories throughout this semester, if the Religion was filled with true believers rather than imposters, than this story would have been a lot different.

Okay, so I want to talk about Sherbern.  He goes on about the mob-mentality of these people and how they are not going to lynch him because they are cowards. He goes on his long thought of mob-mentality which is a common theme in our classroom.  These people are going with the flow of things. Sherbern killed a drunken man who was being obscene and rude. Though, killing him may have been a bit extreme, he was just the town drunk. Only his daughter will really miss him. And Sherbern knows this and he points this out in his little “tangent” about the mob-mentality (which many of the writers we have seen so far have talked about) and basically everyone is like, well yeah you’re right, and leave.

Twain is an interesting writer.  These few chapters remind me of “realismo magico” which is associated with the Boom in the Latin-American writing culture.  Basically this is where the line between reality and fantasy blurs and no one any longer can see the difference. Twain does that here. He goes from the river to these strings of events that lead Huck and Jim into terrible circumstances.

But wait, then Twain throws up back into reality. Huck learns of Jim’s family and his love for his family. This shows us the softer side of both, Huck and Jim. Allowing Huck into his life, Jim is building a relationship with Huck in hopes of him understanding him more. Though Huck doesn’t understand how the black man could love as much as the white man. As we discussed in class, this is crazy because Huck’s dad beat him. He wasn’t loved at all by his white father. Twain really does create some serious oxymoron’s that allow the reader to think, to really think.