Huck Discussion Question: XII - XIV

1.     Huck considers borrowing and stealing the same thing because he says he would give what he takes back, if only he could, something rare. However just to solve this confusion between these two things, he says he won’t borrow anything more.

2.     Huck’s insistence on boarding the wrecked steamboat tells us that the character is looking for an adventure, the kind of deed described by Tom Sawyer in his stories.

3.     The name of the steamboat “The Walter Scott” is referred to the name of a Romantic Novel’s writer and in this situation is used as an ironic reference to the Romanticism: the boat that represent the movement sinks.

4.     Huck saves the murders because he thinks that one day he can be a murder too, and he think to the way he would like to be treated in that situation. This compassionate behavior of Huck towards the murders tells us that even though Huck wants to looks like an adventurous man, a robber and a murder without pity, he is a good and sensible boy.

5.     Huck is able to enlist the aid of the boatman acting with cunning. He notices that the boatman is very greedy so he tells the boatman that on the steamboat which is sinking there is the niece of a very wealthy man of the town.

6.     In this sentence Jim expresses that he has no more hope because or he will drown or, if he will be saved from the water, he will be sold as a slave.

7.     Huck doesn’t know a lot about dukes and kings. He probably starts their descriptions from real facts but then he adds a lot of exaggerated details. He says kings never work, only have fun time and that their power let them doing everything they want. Probably Huck adds this elements to make his stories more fascinating too.

8.     Jim doesn’t like King Salomon because he doesn’t approve his behavior. The king has a harem with a lot of wives and a lot of children and he has a big power. Jim consider the king wasteful especially after he knows the king wants to solve a debate about a baby by cutting it in a half. The king is compared with the owner of a plantation. These too have a lot of power and a lot of slaves working for them that have to respond to their orders without complaining.

Huck Discussion Questions: V – IX

1.     Pap doesn’t want Huck to receive and education and dislikes him because he is already able to read and write. What Pap says is the opposite of what a dad should say to his son, indeed Pap isn’t a good dad. The irony is the fact that Pap despises the education while he needs one too. He shouldn’t discourage Huck to study but use him as an example.

2.     The refusal of the court to grant custody of Huck to the Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, preferring Huck’s brute father, reflects a society based in injustice, where the owner of the power himself are not able to fulfill their offices.

3.     Huck prefers stays at the shanty because there he is free from the rules of the society. He hasn’t to behave politely and he hasn’t to care about cleaning, himself and the house. Practically when Pap isn’t there he can do everything he wants. This reflects the theme of the evasion. Huck doesn’t want to be part of the common society, he doesn’t want to be squared in a model, he wants to feel free and go looking for new adventures

4.     When Pap is drunk he shows very angry with the government. His anger is fueled at most when he listens that the government approved good measures toward slaves and black people; he looks very intolerant against blacks and slaves. The reason while Pap hates government so much is in Pap himself. He is a bad guy, who doesn’t follow the rules so it’s normal that he doesn’t like who made those rules.

5.     Huck’s escape and his consecutive meeting with Jim represent the theme of the Freedom. Once escaped form Pap, Huck is definitely free: free from the society, free from the rules. The first person he meets is Jim, another new-free-man. Jim himself escaped from his owner, the Widow. Now they can join together the beginning of their new free life.

6.     The ironic is that Huck believes that Tom is a brave boy, an expert adventurer, skillful in planning strategy, but in the reality Tom is not so capable. Tom is just a dreamer whose imagination make him create a lot of suggestive stories that appear really because they are full of details. But Tom creation aren’t more than fantasy story, they can’t be real. In the reality Tom isn’t able to do what he tells in his story. That’s why his help wouldn’t be useful to Huck, that on the opposite, is very practical.

7.     When Huck finds bread to eat he remember the Bible’s episode of the Last Dinner and links it to that. He thinks that God really can have helped him. So he restarts to think about religion and his behavior towards God.

8.     When Jim meets Huck he thinks he is a ghost and wants him to go away. This reflects the big superstition of the character who even consider dead a person alive!

9.     Running into Jim is like running into the freedom. Huck’s run is his rebirth because it defines the passage from the life in the society, under the rules, to a life completely free. The conflict in Huck’s mind is cause by the fact that Huck is helping Jim to escape. He is confused about that because on one side he wants to help the slave, but on the other he knows the slaves is ownership of the Widow Douglas, woman who Huck owes a lot to.

10. Huck could be called abolitionist because helping Jim, a slave, to escape, he goes against slavery and against the society, considering slavery is part of the society. So being consider an abolitionist isn’t a good thing.

11. Jim bases his prediction about the future on his past experience. In Jim’s prediction knowledge and superstition are mixed together and sometimes this let him to do previsions that come true.

12. In doing the trick to Jim, Huck wants just take fun of the man because he likes tricks. He doesn’t consider, strangely because generally he does, the superstitious meaning of his act. Jim, on the other side, who is very superstitious, says soon that that would have brought bad luck, indeed it is.

13. Huck’s trip to shore shows us different aspects of his personality. He looks smart and crafty, two new characteristic of the character that let him to build a good strategy, before for leaving home avoiding that the other people look for him, and then for asking information (he dresses up like a girl).

14. When Mrs. Loftus discusses the money that Tom had found, the common trait that emerges in the description is the exaggeration. The woman exaggerates the amount of money that Tom has found. This is very common in human speeches.

15. The satire is that the amount of the reward for a slave escaped, Jim in this case, is higher than the amount of the reward for a man who is accused to have done a murder, in this case Pap accused to have killed Huck.

Question about first 4 chapters of "The adventures of Huck Finn"

Discussion Questions Notice – IV

1.     The Widow Douglas is an old woman that took Huck with her like her son. She is “dismal regular and decent […] in all her ways”. She wanted Huck to be a polite person and to receive a good education. That’s why she care a lot about his behaves. She pretends Huck to be perfectly on time to dinner and accustom him to say some prays before eating. Plus she uses to teach the boy about Moses and the Bulrushers and she doesn’t want at all that Huck smokes.

In the beginning Huck is really interested in Moses stories but since he discovers that Moses is dead he loses all this curiosity about him: Huck doesn’t care about dead people, in his opinion this has no sense. This defines Huck like a person based on the practicality, a material practicality. Not being interesting about the past and the people that lived before is a bad deficit because it is possible to learn a lot from the past.

2.     The superstition is a characteristic of Huck. While he doesn’t have a good relation with God, he is very superstitious. First of all he believes in ghosts and thinks that they are souls of dead people that didn’t find the peace, so they go whispering in the night. But most of all he shows his superstition when once he was terribly mad of have killed a spider. Thinking that it was a sign of bad luck he tried different “rituals” to remove the negative influence: he stood up, turned around and crossed himself three times, then he used a piece of thread to tied a tuft of hair in a knot, believing that that kept witches away. So he believes in witches too. But in his opinion this wouldn’t help his condition because this last operation works only for people who lose horseshoe. Well summarizing Huck believes in ghosts and witches and thinks that killing a spider or losing a horseshoe is a signal of bad luck which needs a ritual to remove bad luck.

Another example of superstition is in chapter 2. Tom and Huck plays trick to Jim and he believes that the witches did it.

In other superstition can be found in the beginning of chapter 4 when Huck wants at all costs some salt to throw it backward and in then when Huck goes to Jim to listens the black man predicting his future in the bowl.

3.     After Huck knows about Heaven and Hell from Miss Watson, he whishes he will go to Hell because he wants a radical change and he doesn’t think that the Heaven is the right place were he can stay. Then he is happy knowing that probably Tom Sawyer will go to the Hell too because he want them together.

4.     Tom wants to play a trick Jim while Huck says that it is too risky because Jim can wake up. In the end Tom plays a trick to Jim by himself. The trick is pretty simple, he just gets Jim hat and hangs it on a branch over his head, while the man is sleeping in the ground. When Jim wake up and find his hat on the tree he think that the witches have done that. So telling that to the other people, he tells how the witches kidnapped him and carried him in the hell and how he survived. He described him like a sort of hero. This shows another time how the ignorance makes people believing in witches and supernatural phenomena. It is another element of superstition.

5.     With the expression “Jim was most ruined for a servant…” is expressed how Jim is silly. He thinks to be cool because the witches have kidnapped him and he has seen the witches, all superstitions and elements of ignorance.

6.     Tom leaves 5 cents on the table to pay the candles they took. Tom does this because doesn’t want to be a brute robber but a gentleman robber who respects and honor’s code and he rubbery only when he can get big treasures, not just candles like in this situation.

7.     Tom and Huck are two fluffy kids who love the adventure. They pretend to be robbers and create a secret society for robbing. They share the same boyishness. The main difference between the two guys is that Tom is very creative and full of fantasy. He set their believes on what he read in the books and imagines the reality like a fantastic story. Huck, on the opposite side is characterized by a material practicality. He doesn’t believe much in Tom stories and doesn’t believe in religion. He doesn’t think is important knowing about people form the past because they are “past”. Contrasting with this his tract is his superstition: he believes in ghost, witches and bud luck, but probably this is common for a child unaware of the life. Another tract that differentiates the two is that Tom tends always to be the boss, while Huck uses to follow Tom. Tom is more intrepid than Huck and he likes the risk.

8.     Tom thinks that is important that the gang is considered “highwaymen” because in this way their deeds will be more adventurous. Burglars just steal houses and cattle and things simple like that while they are going to robber stagecoaches and carriages on the road, kill people, and take their watches and money, everything with masks on and that is more exciting.

9.     Miss Watson tells to Huck to use to pray because praying he can have done everything he prays for. But Huck, trying and retrying, never obtains anything of what he asks in his prayers. He concludes that Miss Watson has lied him about the prayers so the religion doesn’t seems so useful to him.

10. Tom Sawyer calls Huck a “numskull” because Huck wants to face the magicians that transformed the Arabs and the elephants in a School picnic and this would be a very dangerous and imprudent action. In the reality there are no magicians and Tom makes the deed so dangerous only because wants to keep secret his lie.

11. Huck admits that Tom believed in what he said: the Arabs, the elephants, the magicians. But for Huck those seem unreal as unreal are all the things he has to study at the Sunday school, so all the things about religion and God. Here it is like the religion is compared to a lie, to a kids’ game.

12. Because, probably, he doesn’t want his father to get them or he doesn’t want seem well-off to his father now that he knows that his father is back.

Sentences

EVANESCENT: Beauty is evanescent, it's the mind to be important.

VENERATION: The veneration of gods was a common practise in Grece in the past.

Sentences

MAGNATE: Obama is an important magnate in US.

MALLEABLE: Nowadays having a malleable mind is a very important skill in work world.

Scarlet Letter 39

The meeting between Hester and Dimmesdale in chapters 16 and 17 happens in the depth of the forest. This place isn’t casual. This place evocates the ideas of secrecy and mystery. Indeed the topic of the conversation is in this way. They tell about a truth only they know and that no one else has to know. This is way the meeting happens in the wood, away from everyone, in a place apart of social and common uses. In the forest no one would judge them, plus their secret is keeping safer.

Scarlet Letter 38

"Once in my life I met the Black Man!" said her mother. "This scarlet letter is his mark!"

For the first time Hester lies about the symbol she has on her bosom. Before she has never felt this necessity. Everyone in the city knows her story and look at her with accusatorial eyes. But Pearl is so young and so naïve. She probably can’t understand the act of the mother, his consequences and especially how it conditioned her life itself. She could try a wrong meaning and teaching from the truth so her mother prefer hides it to her.