The Letter

Huck decides to write a letter to Mrs. Watson, because he is feeling guilty to taking her slave, and protecting the run away. Mrs. Watson was always nice to Huck, and for him to do something this low and steal from her is not right. While he feels guilty for helping Jim, Mrs. Watson's slave, run away, other emotions and thoughts over power his guilt. During Jim and Huck's journey, Huck began to have a special bond towards Jim, and vise versa. He has gone through so much with Jim, he feels really attached to him. In the early instance in the book when Huck was about to snitch on Jim, Jim said that Huck was the nicest white person he has ever met, and how much of a friend Huck was to Jim. He soon feels guilty for wanting to tell on someone who stayed up extra late, and took more than one shift just so Huck could sleep, and someone he considers a friend. This is the main reason he rips up the letter, but there is another reason also. If Mrs. Watson finds out he has committed the crime of helping a slave run away, and essentially stealing her property, she will not be happy with him. He is afraid he might get in trouble if she finds out the truth and doesn't want that to happen. Not only will he get in trouble, but Huck is also afraid that Mrs. Watson will sell Jim down river, which is exactly why Jim ran away. This just shows Huck using his morals again. Huck is starting to grow up in the book, and is begining to act more mature. He is starting to tink of the big picture of different problems, instead of the small picture, and just choosing the easy road out.

Huck ruins the plan

During these chapters, the Duke and King come up with a plan to steal a great amount of money from the Wilk's family, during Peter Wilk's funeral. Huck doesn't really like this plan so, he comes up with his own plan to stop it. The first thing Huck decides to do to ruin the King and Duke's plan is to steal their money. After watching them for a little bit, he sees they put the money under the bed. Huck needed to hide the money somewhere else, but when he is about to hide it outside of the house, people start coming so he hides it in the next best thing, Peter Wilk's coffin. This part of Huck's plan does not turn out how he expects it to. Before he has time to take the money out of the coffiin, and return it to Mary Jane and the other sisters, the coffin is buried, with the money in it. Huck thought he had a real problem now, but he decided to just tell Mary Jane what happened, hoping that she would be ok with it. Telling Mary Jane is exactly what he did, he went straight to her and told her the stroy from begining to end, from the point when he first met Duke and King till why he was sitting next to her right then. Huck told her all about how they were just con-artist trying to steal money from people. When he tells Mary Jane the truth about the men, they both come up with their own plan to get the men caught and exposed.
I think Huck decides to ruin their plan because he really does care about doing the right thing. He felt bad for all of the people the Duke and King were hurting, and wanted to make it up to them. Huck has always felt sort of bad for following their plan, and this is the first time he goes against them.

Daughter

Jim tells a story about his ornery daughter, who had a really hard time for a few years because of her scarlet fever, and she never did what she was told or responded to people talking to her because she became deaf. Huck wakes up and find Jim thinking about this, and he is almost in tears. He was thinking of the horrible day he found out his daughter being deaf. He tried to get her attention, and she stood their ignoring him. This day was so sad for him, and meant bad news for his daughter. Now if the little girl was told to do something, she wouldn't be able to because she wouldn't hear the request, and she would be punished for it. This showed a really soft side of Jim. He was sitting there worrying about his family he left behind. We had never seen Jim cry before in the book over a topic like this. It just shows the thought process Jim has on a day to day bases. When ever he heard a pow or a noise, its thoughts would be directed to his days as a slave, and even though he was on his road to freedom now, his children and wife are still living their lives as slaves.

Duke and King

From the very first second I met Duke and King, when they were running down the creek, being chased, I had a bad feeling about them. Once they started talking, this feeling grew even stronger. Obviously, these men are liars. What are the chances, that two men, running away from the same thing, even though they have never met, are both royalty of some sort. These chances are very slim. The fact that they would lie about something like this is puzzling to me. Did they really think that Huck and Jim would not think this coincidence was strange? With everything they do, I think there is something more than what they say involved. I was worried when they were talking about the flier for the run away slave Jim, because at first, I thought he was going to turn Jim in. This had me very worried. I think that Jim and Huck should not be traveling with them. First off, the more people they have on their raft, the harder everything becomes for them. They are trying to be inconspicuous, but with 4 people on the raft, instead of two that is much harder. Secondly, both of these men are liars, and Huck and Jim do not know if they would help them if they needed to be helped. If put in a difficult situation, Huck has no idea whether they would help them or go against them because it is helpful for the Royalty. Lastly, these men have bad habits, that could get them in trouble. Once the King found the Whiskey, he continued to get drunk, which could be very dangerous to them in the future.

Huck and Buck

Huck and Buck are similar in many ways. First there are the very superficial and surface level ways. Their names are very similar, with just a letter differentiating them. Also, they are boys that are around the same age, and they both live in a slave owning environment. Past the superficial levels of similarity, they have many things in common too. Both of them are raised in very nice house holds, yet they would rather be out in the wild. When Buck firsts meets Huck, he takes him into the clothing and starts talking to him a mile a minute. He starts asking him if he likes to get dressed up on Sundays for church, because he didn't like to, and this is the exact same for Huck. They are forced to live in the "civilized" societies, with all of the fancy things, and the proper surroundings, yet they both do not like doing the "proper" things they are told to do. Also, both of them are always up for an adventure. Obviously, Huck is always a child who loves going out and exploring, and is always looking for an adventure, which is part of the reason he is at Buck's home in the first place. Buck is also this child. When Huck and Buck were walking through the forest, and they found one of the rivals, Buck told Huck to hide in the forest, while Buck shot at him, and then they ran for their life. This isn't something a person not looking for adventure would do, rival or no rival.

Raftsmen

In this chapter, there are many events that give us an idea about raftsmen in general. First off, these men are looked down upon by the bigger steamboats, which shows that, normally, the upper class do not use the rafts as much as the lower to middle class do. When the steamboat ran into Huck's raft, and afterwords did not even stop to see if everyone was alright, it shows that they are on the bottom of the boat food chain. The steamboats can plow their way through the rafts andnot be fazed at all. Second, they, likemost southerns, did not like black people. A raftsmen we met in this chapter was asking every boat/raft he saw, if they had or hade seen any black people, because there were some slaves that had run away and he was trying to find them and get them back to their owners. Also, while the Steamboats might not like them, in general they are very helpful people. When Huck told them his pap was sick, they were going to help them get to shore, without even thinking about it. Even when they found out he had "small pox", while they didnt help them get to shore, they gave them lots of money to help them with their journy, which was extremly generous, considering they didn't know Huck from the next person they met. To steamboats, raftsmen were beneath them. To slaves, they were men to look out for. But to the average joe, raftsmen were people that would help you when you needed it.

Helping Hand

At first, he wants to get on the wrecked ship to see if there is any loot from them to "borrow." He thinks that there are probably the captain's things, and if they get them, they will become richer than they have ever been before. Once Huck gets on the ship, he sees that two men are threatening the other man. Now, he has to motives for being on the ship, to help the man that is being threatened, and to get the valuable items on the ship, not to mention, he thinks the only way they can get away from the murderers is to steal their ship. He convinces Jim to help him take the ship, but then later feels bad about this decision, mainly by talking up the idea that there is someone that is going to get killed on the wrecked ship, if they didn't do anything about it. While at first he wanted to take the ship to escape, he then felt bad about it and backtracked to watch out for the people on the ship. This just shows that Huck, even though he never really comes out and says it straight on, likes to fight for the under dog. The example of the genie is another time where this side of him shows through. In that situation, he thinks that people shouldn't just do things for other people, which is helping the slaves, another underdog. In this situation, there is a man that is obviously getting bullied because of what he has, both his possessions and his knowledge, and the men are threatening to kill him. Huck doesn't want to see this happen, so even though he might say they should help to get the loot, he really wants to help to save the man in danger.

Helping Hand

Trick on Jim

When Huck found Jim again, he was extremely happy, because now he didn't have to be lonely anymore. Jim started talking about all the bad luck Huck was getting when he was doing certain things, but Huck thought it was all nonsense, because they just found the great discovery of the house. Jim had been getting on Huck about how him keeping the rattle snake skin was going to give them lots of bad luck, and Huck didn't believe that, so he decided to trick him. He found a rattle snake, killed it, and then took the dead body, rolled it up, and put it at the end of Jim's sleeping bag. Jim went in and stood next to his sleeping bag, and the snakes mate bit him on his heel, because when rattle snakes die, their mates comes and curls around them. This caused Huck to believe that maybe they did have bad luck now, and he decided to not have a rattle snake skin again. Huck decided to play this trick on Jim this time, because he didn't have to worry about the same things as he did last time he had the opportunity to scare Jim. Last time, he was worried about Jim seeing it was him and telling on him, or all of them making to much noise and the widow would find out. In this situation, he didn't have the worry of the widow, so he could do what ever he pleased. He was never worried about actually hurting Jim, or he didn't want to do it because it was mean to do, he just didn't want to get in trouble. Also, he just thought that would be a good trick to play to have Jim not freak out about his superstitions again.