Thursday, September 29, 2011

Huck Finn 2

After our class discussion on Wednesday I realized some things that I dident catch while I read. The first thing was how Mark Twain compared superstition and religion. Jim is a slave and obviously very poor. He is very superstitious throughout the story. Huck is in the middle. He show some superstition when he kills the spider accidentally but then Huck makes fun of Jim a lot as well for being superstitious. Tom on the other hand doesn't believe in superstition. He calls it being religious. The higher class you are the less superstitious you become.

Another thing we pointed out in class was that Tom doesn't see Jim as a real person. All of Toms adventures don't consider Jim. You can see that the society that Tom has grown up in thinks that blacks are not real People. I think a quote from the book is: "They can't care for their son the same way a white person can".

2 comments:

  1. I also found the relationship between social class and superstition and religion interesting. When Tom treated Jim as just another adventure I was really frustrated because it was obvious that he didn't care about his situation at all. I am constantly surprised by just how much whites dehumanized blacks during this time period.

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  2. I think i'm in the same boat about Tom in the end of the book when they are trying to break Jim out. Even though Tom knows Jim is a free man, he still has to do it how the books tell him to do it. I asked this question in class did Huck question Tom of the very start of the book? the answer was yes. In the beginning, yes Huck did question Tom and his ways of doing things. I just got the feeling that he questioned him even more at the end once he got away from the common thinking of the time and got to know Jim as a person, and had time to develop his own ideas of what was wrong and right

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