Huck Finn 3

      After floating down the Mississippi in hopes of finding the Ohio, Jim and Huck begin to suspect that they have missed the junction altogether.  In yet another stroke of bad luck which Jim attributes to a prank involving a dead snake that Huck played on him earlier, the canoe collides with a steamboat and the two are separated.  While it is unclear what happens to Jim, Huck makes it to shore and is taken in by a family called the Grangerfords, who are in a feud with another family called the Shepherdsons.  It is here that some of Huck's opinions of death are expressed.  One of the Grangerfords, Emmeline, is now deceased but used to write macabre poetry which Huck could not stand for its subject matter.  While walking through the woods with one of the Grangerford slaves, Huck witnesses a gunfight between the two families and is scarred by the death of two Grangerfords.  This is a big moment for Huck, who has spent the whole book up until this point trying to run away from death, only to find that it lurks around every corner.  When he realizes this, he does not immediately flee, but instead takes the time to pull Buck Grangerford's body out of the river, which signifies maturation for Huck.  He ventures on and reunites with Jim, who reveals that he was able to keep the raft by lying to a group of slaves saying that the raft belonged to his master.  

      After floating downriver for a while, Huck and Jim decide to pick up two conmen who are fleeing the people they screwed over.  The conmen try to convince Huck and Jim that they are an English duke and the rightful heir to the French throne, which Huck doubts silently to himself.  The pairing of Jim's lie earlier in order to keep the raft and continue to pursue freedom with all of the lies of the conmen who are simply doing it to make money poses the question "When is it okay to lie?"  Based on the fact that Huck, who has elements of a Christ figure, excuses Jim's dishonesty because it was for his own survival, but seems to frown upon the use of lying to make money, it can be inferred that this is so for all or most cases.  However, this question is further complicated later in the story when Huck fails in his attempt to give stolen money back to a family, the disappearance of which he later blames on a group of slaves.

      In a town in Arkansas, Huck witnesses the shooting of a drunkard followed by the attempted lynching of the perpetrator, who is essentially able to escape his demise by making the mob feel cowardly and weak.  This is a tactic that Pap had used on Huck while trying to convince him to drop out of school, though Huck ended up running away in spite of that.  This shooting does not seem to affect Huck as much as did the Grangerford shooting - probably because he did not know this man and probably because the victim was a drunkard like Pap.  However, it still does impact him, which shows that Huck regards all human life the same way - something that nobody except for Jim has demonstrated in this story.

      As the story progresses, Huck becomes increasingly aware that Jim, despite being a black, uneducated slave, is not very different from himself or from any other white men that he has met in that he loves his family.  When something reminds Jim of a time he mistreated his daughter and makes him upset, it became apparent to me that Jim actually loves his children more than Pap loves Huck.  Whether or not Huck had this same revelation, I can only speculate, but Huck certainly knows now that black men are equally capable of producing the same emotions as white men despite everything that Huck has been led to believe until now.  Furthermore, he becomes disappointed when the duke and the dauphin pretend to be the brothers of a recently deceased man who also happen to be the heirs to his fortune.  However, when expressing his discontent with this action, Huck does not say he is disappointed with the white race for committing such an act, but instead he is disappointed in humanity as a whole.