Huckleberry Finn Dialectical Journals
Form, Structure and Plot: “Well pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up the money, and he went for me, too, for not stopping school.” | At this time in the book, Huck’s drunk of a father has just reentered his life for the sole purpose of getting the money from the treasure that Huck and Tom found in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This shows that Pap doesn’t care very much for his son and that getting money so that he can run off and get drunk every night is of importance to him. This is also the event that starts Huck’s journey down the river. | “I took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it and hacked it considerable, a-doing it. I fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down on the ground to bleed,” | This is the part of the book where Huck is implementing his plan to fool both Huck’s father, Pap and the Widow Douglas because he wants to be away from both of them: he wants to be away from Pap because he is abusive towards Huck and he wants to be away from the Widow because she wants to civilize him. Huck fakes his own death as to make sure that no one will follow him. | “Then I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our place a mile and a half below, as hard as I could go. I landed, and slopped through the timber and up the ridge and into the cavern. There Jim laid, sound asleep on the ground. I roused him out and says: ‘Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain’t a minute to lose. They’re after us!’” | Huck is behaving very eccentrically right now because he had just gotten back from the mainland where he discovered that some of the townspeople were coming to the island because they believed that a runaway slave had been living there which was indeed the truth because Jim and Huck had been camping out there. Because Jim and Huck had to escape from the island, they were forced to retreat down the Mississippi