The quote also reveals Huck’s personal morality – he believes in keeping his word no matter what, even if keeping his word creates personal discomfort for him.
In this regard, Tom’s make-believe smacks too much of religion, and Huck goes on to declare that Tom’s stories “had all the marks of a Sunday school.” This quote from Chapter 7 represents one of the few occasions when Huck directly addresses the reader. Huck arrived at Jackson’s Island around nightfall and immediately fell asleep.
Huck sinks to the floor of the raft and almost cries that the two con men are not yet out of his and Jim’s lives. Even though Huck is helping the Wilkses expose the duke and king, he is wise enough to know that the townspeople are stupidly unpredictable, so, instead of taking his chances with the mob, he makes a bold bid for freedom.
Note, also, that the neighbors demonstrate their racism in thinking it must have been other slaves who helped Jim, not even considering that Huck and Tom could be responsible. Aunt Sally grows increasingly worried that “Sid” (i.e., Tom) hasn’t come home yet.
Instead of accepting Huck's story, the lawyer tells Huck, "I wouldn't strain myself if I was you. I reckon you ain't used to lying . . . You do it pretty awkward." Although Huck's entire journey has been based on lies and deception, he is unable to fool intelligent men for even a moment.
(29) How does the lawyer attempt to determine who the real brothers are? Does it work? They bring out an old letter that Harvey Wilkes had written to his brother, it doesn't work because it turns out that William Wilkes is the one who wrote the letters but he has a broken hand and couldn't write.
Huck tells them he wishes they would, because, he lies, the white man on the raft is his father, who's sick, along with his mother and Mary Ann, also aboard the raft. As the men paddle to investigate, Huck lets on that the illness that afflicts his family is both contagious and dangerous: smallpox.
Summary: Chapter 20 The duke and the dauphin ask whether Jim is a runaway slave. Huck makes up a story about how he was orphaned and tells them that he and Jim have been forced to travel at night since so many people stopped his boat to ask whether Jim was a runaway.
Huck and Jim are concerned about the clandestine behavior of the con men, and when Huck finally sees a chance to escape, he discovers that the duke and the king have made a fake handbill and turned in Jim for a $40 reward.
Summary: Chapter 30 The dauphin nearly strangles Huck out of anger at his desertion, but the duke stops him. The con men explain that they escaped after the gold was found. The duke and the dauphin each believe that the other hid the gold in the coffin to retrieve it later, without the other knowing.
Summary: Chapter 17 A man calls off the dogs, saving Huck, who introduces himself as “George Jackson.” The man invites “George” into his house, where the hosts express an odd suspicion that Huck is a member of a family called the Shepherdsons. Eventually, Huck's hosts decide that he is not a Shepherdson.
Summary: Chapter 15 He tries to paddle back to the raft, but the fog is so thick that he loses all sense of direction. After a lonely time adrift, Huck reunites with Jim, who is asleep on the raft. Jim is thrilled to see Huck alive, but Huck tries to trick Jim by pretending that Jim dreamed up their entire separation.
After meeting up with the two men, Huck learns that the older one got into trouble for selling “an article to take tartar off the teeth,” while the other, younger, one for running a religious “temperance revival” against drinking alcohol while, his devotees discover, drinking himself.
What advice to the men give Huck? Float along twenty miles to a town and tell them he has chills and fever.
Terms in this set (18) Why does Huck tell Mary Jane the truth? He sees how sad she is about the separation of the slave families and tells her they will soon be back.
In Chapter 28 of ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'' Huck decides to tell Mary Jane the truth about the duke and the dauphin. In revealing the truth, Huck hopes both to ease his conscience and to enlist Mary Jane's help in finding a way to flee with Jim.
In Chapter 1, Huck stays up after everyone has gone to bed and listens to the sounds of the night. As he sits alone, he hears sounds that jumpstart his imagination, and he makes up this story about a lonesome and misunderstood ghost. On the one hand, the quote illustrates Huck’s propensity for storytelling. On the other hand, the ghost in the story ...
There are very few moments in the book when Huck feels at ease, and this example from Chapter 19 is one of them. Huck and Jim have enjoyed a couple of incident-free days on the raft, and in that time they’ve grown more comfortable with one another. Here, the two characters enjoy a friendly and warm-hearted discussion of the nature of the universe. This moment represents a rare example of Huck and Jim being able to revel in a shared sense of freedom.
After Jim tells Huck off for the prank he played in the fog in Chapter 15 , a debilitating sense of guilt sets in as Huck begins to realize the larger stakes of his adventure with Jim. This quote, which comes from Chapter 16, finds Huck meditating on morality. He realizes that helping Jim escape does harm to Miss Watson. But he also understands that helping Miss Watson would hurt Jim. Huck can’t decide what to do and hence feels “so miserable I most wished I was dead.”
The promise Huck makes in Chapter 8 not to give Jim up reveals popular sentiment of the day about people who helped slaves escape. Huck knows that he would be shunned and despised if people – meaning other white people – found out he didn’t turn Jim into the authorities for escaping.
Huck believes that the Widow looks down on smoking because of her religious background, and not because she has any direct experience with it. Condemning something without full knowledge of it strikes Huck as a form of hypocrisy, ...
The Widow emphasizes that main point of prayer is to help other people. Huck understands this lesson, and later in the novel it becomes one important source of his moral crisis. He believes that he is helping Jim by helping him escape slavery, but he also knows that helping Jim means harming Miss Watson.
Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done.
After disinterring Peter ’s corpse, the townspeople discover the bag of gold that Huck hid in Peter’s coffin. The man who is holding Huck by the arm to prevent him from running away lets go of the boy to get a look at the bag, and Huck immediately makes a run for it.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 29. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Despite the arrival of the two men who claim to be Harvey and William Wilks, the duke and king persist in their fraudulence.
Even though Huck is helping the Wilkses expose the duke and king, he is wise enough to know that the townspeople are stupidly unpredictable, so, instead of taking his chances with the mob, he makes a bold bid for freedom. But that freedom is limited by the arrival of the duke and king, whose self-interestedness has come to metaphorically imprison Huck and Jim in a life of fraud and close scrapes.
At the tavern, Doctor Robinson asks the king to produce the bag of gold so that it can be kept safely till the townspeople determine who is who. The king says that the Wilks ’ slaves stole the gold, but nobody really believes him.
He meets Jim by the river, and the two begin to drift away. Suddenly, though, Huck hears a familiar sound, the humming of a skiff. It is the duke and king. Huck sinks to the floor of the raft and almost cries that the two con men are not yet out of his and Jim’s lives.
The real Harvey Wilks asks the king to reveal what is tattooed onto Peter Wilks ’s chest. Whitening, the king at last says that it is a pale, blue arrow. The old man says that that’s false, that his tattoo is really of the letters “P.B.W.”. But the men who buried Peter Wilks say they saw no such mark.
The king’s guess as to Peter Wilks’s tattoo is, so audacious, may be what saves him and the duke from immediate incarceration. Again, it is ironic that the townspeople don’t believe the real Harvey Wilks, and they are so irrationally flammable as to denounce even him as a fraud. Their search for truth is farcical at best.
Eventually, Uncle Silas takes Huck home, much to Aunt Sally ’s relief.
The doctor replies: “‘Singular dream.’”. The doctor assumes that Huck misspeaks when he says that it was Tom’s dream that shot him, but in a sense this is exactly what happened: Tom’s fealty to his romantic, impractical dream of Jim’s escape led the farmers who shot Tom to be on the lookout in the first place.
Huck fetches a nice old doctor, telling him that Tom is his brother and that, while the two were out hunting, Tom had a bad dream and kicked his gun, which shot him. When the doctor asks Huck to tell him again how Tom was wounded, Huck says that “‘He had a dream…and it shot him.’”.
Huck volunteers to fetch him, but Aunt Sally tells him he’ll do no such thing. Uncle Silas goes out to look for “Sid,” but he doesn’t even come across his path. After Aunt Sally tucks Huck into bed, she speaks with him and begins to cry.
But Huck is not always free to act as he will. For example, he would go with the doctor, but the canoe can only carry one person. Huck’s freedom is limited in part by external circumstances.
When not in the company of Tom, Huck is restored to his good senses. He realizes how needlessly stressful Tom’s plan has been for the Phelpses, and with noble self-discipline he declines to act on his own impulse to go to Tom for Aunt Sally’s sake. Tom is a good friend, but not a good influence, on Huck.
Pap asks if Huck is really as rich as he has heard and calls his son a liar when Huck replies that he has no more money. Pap then takes the dollar that Huck got from Judge Thatcher and leaves to buy whiskey. The next day, Pap shows up drunk and demands Huck’s money from Judge Thatcher.
Summary: Chapter 6. Pap sues Judge Thatcher for Huck’s fortune and continues to threaten Huck about attending school. Huck continues to attend, partly to spite his father. Pap goes on one drunken binge after another. One day, he kidnaps Huck, takes him deep into the woods to a secluded cabin on the Illinois shore, ...
Huck tells Jim that he has found Pap ’s tracks in the snow and wants to know what his father wants. Jim says that the hairball needs money to talk, so Huck gives Jim a counterfeit quarter. Jim puts his ear to the hairball and relates that Huck’s father has two angels, one black and one white, one bad and one good.
Pap complains that Judge Thatcher has delayed the trial to prevent him from getting Huck’s wealth. He has heard that his chances of getting the money are good but that he will probably lose the fight for custody of Huck. Pap continues to rant about a mixed-race man in town; Pap is disgusted that the man is allowed to vote in his home state of Ohio, and that legally he cannot be sold into slavery until he has been in Missouri six months. Later, Pap wakes from a drunken sleep and chases after Huck with a knife, calling him the “Angel of Death” but stopping when he passes out. Huck holds a rifle pointed at his sleeping father and waits.
Pap eventually lands in jail after a drunken spree. The new judge takes Pap into his home and tries to reform him, but the judge and his wife prove to be very weepy and moralizing. Pap tearfully repents his ways but soon gets drunk again, and the new judge decides that the only way to reform Pap is with a shotgun.
Pap promises to teach Widow Douglas not to “meddle” and is outraged that Huck has become the first person in his family to learn to read.
Because we have no background information to explain his present state, his role is primarily symbolic.
However, in reality he plays a very significant role in Huck's life. He guards Huck's fortune, ensuring that Huck will always have enough money, and he keeps the fortune out of the hands of Huck's drunk and abusive father. He also serves as an advocate for Huck, regularly going to court to try and get him away from his father, and under the guardianship of someone more suitable.
He invests it for them, ensuring that they always have enough money and giving them interest for it--a dollar a day. This is about equal to $28 a day now, a pretty significant amount of money, especially for someone as young as Huck. By investing it and watching it for them, Thatcher ensures that they will have money for the rest of their lives, and that they won't spend it frivolously. He also ensures that they have spending money immediately, by giving them the interest.
Since Huck does a lot of traveling, this means there are a number of characters that are only briefly present in the novel. We see this with the characters from his hometown, who only physically appear in the novel at the beginning and to a certain extent at the very end. However, these characters still play an important role in Huck's life. One such character is Judge Thatcher, a judge in Huck's hometown, who has known Huck most of his life.
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In many ways, Thatcher serves as a sort of background protector or guardian for Huck, even though he is not with Huck for most of the novel. We see his guardianship in the way he watches Huck's fortune for him and how he tries to get Huck away from his abusive father.
At first glance this may seem like Thatcher is taking advantage of Huck and essentially stealing from a child. However, this is not the case. At the end of the novel, we find out that he has kept the whole amount for Huck and not actually taken it at all. In reality, he has fought to keep it away from Huck's father. In addition, he continues to give Huck his daily interest until he leaves town.
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Huck and Jim escape from the Walter Scott in the lifeboat, leaving the murderers trapped on the wreck. How does Huck feel about leaving them?
To try and find Huck's body and make it so they can see it.
Huck put a dead one in there and its mate came.
Jim is very stubborn and won't be able to understand Huck's opinion.
The future is uncertain, but he has two paths he can take. This is an example of foreshadowing