RQ+Answers+for+Huck+Finn

=Answers to Reading Questions=

1) Mark Twain opened the novel with a notice to set the tone of the book strait from the beginning; he did not cause any confusion this way. 2) Yes the book can be grouped into distinct action sequences. Some of these sequences are very similar to each other. For instance, Jim is almost sold a few times throughout the novel before he finally does get sold. Huck also does some stealing/plotting with Tom in the beginning and the end. 3) Huck decides to take Jim from Miss Watson in the first place; this was in order to help him from being sold. He then tell the slave hunters that there is no black on the raft. This lead to them being okay for a while. Then he later tries to ditch the two con artists because one of them was offering bounties for slaves and Jim was a black person. That plan backfires because they catch back up and then he gets taken away. He later then plots with Tom to free Jim, this leads to Tom being shot and then everything clears up and it becomes okay again. Jim is treated well and freed for trading his freedom to help save Tom. 4) He gets separated from Jim and then they reunite and Huck lies about it. Jim soon finds out and then they get into a small quarrel. He ends up apologizing but in a racist manner. 5) This happens because they just keep going. At first they wanted to find a nice city but later they ran into the con artists and just wanted to leave them and get away. This never really happened till late so they had just kept going. They had to keep moving also because of the commotion the con artists cause in every place they had stopped. 6) The pattern of them going in the direction they do is important to the plot simply because it causes more friction and tension within the novel to create a more tense and vibrant chain of events. It shows how much more racist the south are towards the blacks. As they move south the attitudes toward the blacks and slaves changes drastically from back when they were in the north. Not so much for Huck because he was raised somewhat like a southerner. But for Jim it did, he was treated more as a person than when he was captured in the south; shackled in a shack. 7) Their experience with the king and the duke pushed them farther and farther from freedom and peace. It caused a small suspense build up as they had created more chaos and more chaos as they had moved along. They were bound to get caught sometime giving the novel a bit more suspense and tension along with giving it a bit of a faster pace as it had been before they had run into them. 8) They both had not really treated him as a human being but as a "nigger" or as a tool to get things done. 9) Huck fin runs into a few instances where he is in danger of hurting his life. The first occasion was when he joined Tom Sawyer's gang. They were plotting to steal and hold people hostage, this would not have been good if they had been caught. The next time was when they saw robbers on the steamboat wreckage. If the robbers had seen them, they would have killed him too. The last one other than the cemetery seen at the end when they free Jim, they would probably have been shot if they had been caught. 10) Yes, it is too much of a coincidence that when Jim finally gets taken, it happens to go to Tom's relatives. On top of that, Tom is on his way and is willing to help out. That is just too large of a coincidence to be true. 11) No they do not hint toward the impossible, it just shows that his imagination just gets the best of him when he starts to plan. Also how easily he is influence by literature. 12) There is a small bit of justice in that he made a gang and plotted something somewhat crazy. It is not truly justified because Huck was also not very innocent; he has been involved in a web of lies ever since he had set off with Jim. 13) Even though him being a fourteen year old boy, he does tell about how he had lied and about his wrong doings. Because of this he is trustworthy but reading between the lines is also a good way to find out the truth.

Back