[H] Katherine: Chapters 20-22

In the chapters twenty to twenty-two, there were a couple of things I noticed. The first thing I found interesting was the incident in the woods where Huck, the dauphin, and duke come across a preacher giving a sermon to a large audience in Pokeville. The preacher calls out to all the people with a “broken spirit . . . a contrite heart” (p. 99) and that “the waters that cleanse is free”. He tries to convince the people to rid of their sin. The King comes up and pretends to be a pirate who has been inspired to “change” his ways, and the people eat it up. These people are extremely gullible it seems and this is not the first time we have seen such actions. Huck’s father, “pap”, does the same thing on page sixteen with Judge Thatcher. Is there a reason Twain has made these people so oblivious? My answer would be yes. It seems to me that this has to do with Huck’s development as a character. He sees the people in the south trying as hard as they can to believe the white man is great, and trying their hardest to see the black man as inferior. It seems to me that Huck sees Jim as more than a black man at times and as he tries to ignore this, he realizes he has to look at Jim because he is the kindest person he has met along this journey.

It seems that everyone we meet in this book is either a liar or a fake, and this only continues throughout these chapters. In chapters twenty-one and twenty-two we meet Boggs and Sherburn, two men who get into a feud and one is killed. Sherburn, the murderer, is lynched by the angry mob, but ends up giving one of the most truthful and admirable speeches so far in the book. This brings up the subject of hypocrisy. A lot of people in this book are hypocrites. Even Ms. Watson, a supposed figure for good and Christianity, was a hypocrite in owning slaves. I believe Mark Twain has used hypocrisy as a source to show the reader that no one is perfect, whites and blacks included.

Continuing the subject of liars and fakes, we must not forget about the Duke and Dauphin, the biggest con men of all. These two men stir up a lot of questions in my mind. I wonder why Twain has made the book full of lies and agendas. Even Huck must lie often, and he covers up the fact that he knows the men are frauds to Jim. It seems to me that Twain is poking fun at the fact that white citizens try to trust and believe in each other and gang up against the blacks, but the ironic part is that they are all lying to themselves and each other. Even the white narrator, our “hero”, is untrustworthy. It seems to me that the blacks are equal to the white men if not better and more honorary.