The ending is outrageous and rough to read, but I think that's the point. Twain provides a glimpse of how dehumanizing slavery is. He intends us to be angry at Tom's pranks and identify with Jim. Basically, he's trying to get the same emotional response out of the reader that Huck has to Jim and it works.
I see the ending of the novel to be a satire towards the Jim Crow Laws. Even after Jim is technically free, he is forced to go through unnecessary procedures by Tom. This shows how white people controlled blacks even after they were free through the Jim Crow laws. The fact that Tom threw rats and bugs into the shed with Jim shows how white people believed that blacks were "dirty" and it was "okay" for them to suffer. Along with this, the problem could be so easily solved (they could steal the key and free him) but Tom decides that it is okay to control him purely for his own amusement.
I loved the ending. Endings are supposed to solve or at least address all the conflicts in the story, and this one does that not only for the plot issues but for the one conflict that people seem to ignore (you did it less so, but I feel this deserves more emphasis). The book begins with Huck in Tom's gang where they act out robber stories, with Tom as the charismatic leader with all the plans. Every boy in town seems to follow his lead on these adventures, and Huck not only admires Tom's education and privilege but also the fact that he always has a plan, a way to get out of trouble so when Huck goes on his quest and encounters actual trouble he constantly wishes Tom were there or that he was Tom both inwardly and out-loud so the smart but woefully ignorant Jim ends up believing the praise Huck gives Tom, so I understood Huck's relief to see Tom and get his input on the break out, and I am happy to point out that it says in the book Huck was horrified by Tom's ideas, and Jim recognized the impracticality, yet both believed wholeheartedly that Tom knew best because he is the alpha personality ideas man so they went along with it. I saw the bit with Tom as Huck's final ascension, Huck only started trying to be civilized in the beginning because he wanted to be like Tom, and realizing Tom's sociopathic betrayal was the final straw that finally inspired Huck to reject civilization "I been there before." Therefore, Tom is civilization itself and Huck finally sees how overrated and below him it is, and at the same time the audience is shown how far Huck has come because Tom is a stupid kid as well as a sociopath while Huck has become a Man.
To me the ending serves two purposes 1. Show how much Huck had changed during the story, at the beginning he wouldn't have seen any problem with Tom's plan, by the end he realizes that Tom is very immature. 2. Show how easy it is to fall back to prejudice attitudes, and very quickly. When he first shows up he tells a story about an explosion on the boat. When asked if anyone was hurt he said "No, kilt a n*****", a phrase I have a hard time convincing myself he would have said a few days earlier on the raft.
If any of y'all have the opportunity, you should look into George Saunders' essay on this book. The key paragraph: " …Tom and Huck represent two viable models of the American character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs. "
No. Huck knew what kind of life he would have there and that he didn't want it, and he knew to get out before he got trapped in it. And he knew there had to be something better for him out there.
Why would Huck follow Tom at the end? Because kids have leaders and followers. It's a matter of charisma, and I saw it happen in my own childhood all the time. Some kids just dominate, because they seem to know best, have all the answers, etc. And kids like Tom don't usually think ethically. I remember some of the nasty things these kids did to me just for fun. This part of the book rings true for me. Remember, they're kids not adults, so they don't have the same developed conscience that adults have, well at least some adults.
"...well at least some adults" indeed. Hopefully, at any age we can grow and develop a respect for conscience, as Huck does by being confronted with conflicts within himself during his adventures, although he is by no means refined into a perfect person. It is never too early, and hopefully never too late.
But to be fair, the ending was hilarious when you actually read it. It's comedy ending, not a deep philosophical ending. All be it a cruel type of comedy.
For Twain, comedy is never *just* comedy. He's making a deeper point about the persistent sadism, violence, and oppression of American society. Twain believed in laughing to keep himself from crying. You get that in a lot of his best work.
Yeah, the jarring shift in tone struck me as a comedic note too. Which isn't to say the whole work is a comedy, because a given work can be serious and frivolous in turns, and the shift from seriousness to comedy can often both punctuate the seriousness and serve as a comedic rimshot. A character starts waxing philosophic and saying some deeply true stuff or asking some real serious questions, and then a goofball character makes a fart sound and runs off to have wacky hijinks. Hilarity ensues, and the audience is left with a lingering "but wait what about all that meaning of life stuff?" ("Do you ever wonder why we're here?" "One of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything. You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don't know man, but it keeps me up at night." "What? I mean why are we out here, in this canyon." "Uh... Oh... Yeah..." "What's all this stuff about God?" "Uh... um... Nothing.")
Pfhorrest "I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One, people are not wearing enough hats. Two, matter is energy. In the Universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia." "What was that about hats again?" ~Monty Python~
"I would argue that you're going to worship something. Maybe it'll be a god, maybe it'll be money or power or fame but there's going to be something that orients your humanness in a particular direction." ...what??? This needs elaboration.
Yeah, this was a lazy, or at least hasty, argument on John's part. Money, power, fame etc. are clearly different from gods. We do, however, make sacrifices for the sake of money (working lousy jobs, etc) in order to stay alive and reasonably happy. This is broadly the relationship that religious folks have with various deities via prayer, tithe, and other religious duties; it is important to recognize that for those us who believe, these duties are no less real than secular ones. As John puts it, "for Huck, hell is an actual place". Religious duties and secular goals, moreover, are rarely ends in themselves, but rather are usually observed and pursued because we want the best for ourselves and the people around us. That phrase, "something that orients your humanness in a particular direction," refers to the higher powers that you acknowledge and decide to appeal to in the hope of a better life for yourself and those you care about. ("Higher" here means "higher than you", so things like money and patriotism qualify.) That's how I would salvage the claim, anyway.
I also think his reply to Past John can be simplified, though, in a way that doesn't involve this argument. Why read religion into the river? Because it gives a new layer to the book that you wouldn't have otherwise. It allows the setting to interact with the religious tensions that Huck experiences.
"worship" is no exclusively religious term. Everybody neads something to work towards, to protect, to worship and therefor to give himself a reason. It may be money, art, a special woman or man, a political idea, a true friendship, making great videos about languages or whatever else the heart desires.
The ending is so funny to me because Tom sees Huck when he gets to the farm and is like "oh no it's a ghost!" but if I remember correctly aunt Polly gets to the farm and sees Huck and she's just like "I should have freaking known."
Perhaps the ending was a way a satirist might bring back down to Earth the reader's perspective of a now open future. Maybe it's Twain's way to remind the reader that though the world might change its ideals in small ways, change is not that simple. Human nature (the way Huck makes moral decisions) will not change quickly, and in fact most people are not entirely free from the influence of the opinions of others they envy or admire. Society will not change that easily, it has too much inertia to, realistically, change over the little time that the book takes place. This "going back" on the principles he discussed are evidence of a world and a person that is just beginning to change, or thinking about changing, but for whom the world won't let them off that easily.
Every discussion I have ever heard about the ending of Huck Finn has always chalked up the ending to the fact that Twain sat on the manuscript for years unsure how to finish it. Your point that it might simply be Twain taking his trademark cynical view of human nature is very interesting ... in a "why didn't I think of this before" way.
I'm disappointed in this comment section. I'm a Christian, yet I accept that the world I live in doesn't always share my views. I have to accept when people make content that is not aligned with my beliefs, because we are living in a very atheist society. And you know what, I'm okay with that. But I'm seeing a lot of comments of people feeling either upset or outright despondent by John's use of the word "worship". Regardless of the connotations of the word, it's a WORD. I'm just puzzled by the anger and bitterness these people are feeling. "I don't worship anything, how could you say that?" And I get it, everyone has their own opinion, but I'm honestly taken aback by this sort of phobia towards religion and any words associated with it. Why does religion make people so uncomfortable? Leave a response below, I'm actually curious. No hate, just want to get to the bottom of all this.
I'm an atheist -- no, more than that an anti-theist -- and I agree. Religious language is part of the cultural milieu of the West and is very often used metaphorically, poetically, or otherwise figuratively. For example, to refer to a hypothetical omniscient neutral perspective as a "God's eye view" sounds perfectly natural and acceptable to me. John's obviously using "worship" here in a sense much less narrow than what people do in churches, following from the material he's talking about which is obviously not literally saying that the Mississippi River in Huck Finn IS LITERALLY A GOD, but that it is in poetic and literary ways "god-like".
I haven't seen any of those comments yet, but I do think it's noteworthy that John authoritatively states that everyone worships something, when many people feel that they don't worship anything. I'd love to see how John defines worship such that the statement "all people worship something" is valid. Is "worship" mean 'aspire to a set of principles'? Because in that case I agree that all humans aspire to something, but in this story I would say the 'god' they worship isn't the river as much as it is the concept of freedom. Or does worship have to be more active, as in "I am worshipping this god". In that case, the active concept is what I imagine a lot of people, myself included, would argue that not everyone does.
+ I'm a Christian too and sometimes I wonder that myself. Maybe society depicts religion as the antithesis of liberty, that submission to something greater is a something that is never truly right, who knows. People tend to avoid that which they fear, and fear that which is unknown. Do words like "worship" conjure up images of the abyss, or perhaps the idea that any so-called "leap of faith" is a leap into a darkness into which humans cannot see? I don't know either.
I’ve never found the ending odd. I guess as an adult, I can see where the thematic differences lie, but when I read this as a kid, I just saw an adventure ending and reality starting again. Which makes sense to kid’s brain. The river was a pipe dream and almost a fantastical adventure that had to end sometime. The end of the book was just reality setting back in, adventure time over.
The ending is the Civil War. The Civil War was the "adventure" to free Jim, AKA the slaves. Remember, Mark Twain fought in the Civil War for two weeks before deserting. Tom knowing that Jim was already free was a basic Northerner knowledge, however Mark Twain decides to satirize the "escape." The disruption in Aunt Sally's house, the missing sheets and the missing spoons, represents the damage done to the South during the war, and Tom being shot by the mob was representing how brothers, neighbors and friends were turned against each other. You may think that Mark Twain, the man who criticized his own homeland, wouldn't do the same to the North, but you have to remember that Mark Twain was a satirist and he would have criticized anyone, mostly if he went against his own region. Another thing worth noting is Huck lighting out for Indian Territory, which would be Oklahoma. He would be going west, which coincides with Mark Twain deserting the Confederate army after serving for two weeks and going west to his brother. It took Twain only two weeks in the war to unveil the hypocrisy of the North and South, and realizing how he didn't want to be "sivilized." This is my theory of the ending. I based most of it off of Mark Twain's life himself.
I'm really loving all the little improvements in this edition of crash course, especially in the thought bubble. Tom and Huck talking via emojis was perfect. XD I also honestly can't wait to see John's interpretation of Lord of the Flies. It was the worst book I've ever been forced to read. Keep up the amazing work, John!
We must keep in mind the times. This was during realism in literature. Books were realistic and often showed romanticism as flawed and foolish. The end of Huck FInn does just this. It shows romanticism and the subsequent age of slavery are still prevalent in society, despite the massive efforts for society to change. Huck realizes that things aren't gonna change. "I been there before." Huck moves on from the entirety of society, realizing that it has no hope of changing and will inevitably repeat. Twain, being a cynic, was pointing out that no matter how much people try to change for the better, society will never not be deplorable. The only option is to leave society completely, or to be trapped in an endless cycle.
I didn't read the river as a god, but as the absence of one. By contrast the land is full of people and religion, and is a terrible place for it. I think arguing the river has to be god because their has to be something you worship (i.e. a god of some form) is circular reasoning.I'm not complaining though, I just think analysis of literature almost always reveals more about the reader and their beliefs than the text itself.
I'm of the camp that Twain used the ending of Huckleberry Finn to show no matter how a few people can grow and change, society can still feel more like the same. We see that during reconstruction in which there's a brief period of African-Americans holding office in the South, gaining equal footing with their white counterparts, but as Twain saw, and we see in history, deep rooted racism that goes back to our foundation of what it meant to be "civilized" in the 19th century made it difficult and nigh impossible for African-Americans to attain true equality at the time. In essence, I think Twain's ending doesn't work as a good ending for a book, but it does make good on commenting on the times, in which he was known very much to do so.
At 3:40 seconds, it suddenly dons on me: that you must spend a great deal of money on your hairdo! The hours it must take to get it just right. My god, such decadence! And you thought no one noticed I bet (hehe).
I disagree with you about the ending. If we continue this theme of Huck Finn rejecting the morality of the Widow's way to respect his own conscience even if he doesn't realize he's doing so, and rejecting too his father's violence, then this last may go to show how even so he still struggles to stand up against the mischief of his friend, even while he doesn't agree with that either. He's had adventure in his long trip down the river, real adventure that doesn't have to be pretended up as Tom's games of imagination always have been, and enough of it to appreciate an easy solution when there is one. He never really wants to go along with this plan. But even so, Tom's way of exerting pressure is friendly and energetic. He takes over everything he gets into, and isn't unbearably stuffy like the widow or dangerous like Pap, so even though he's putting Jim through needless suffering, he's very hard for Huck to turn down while he's there. So he goes along with it. I don't think that message is a mistake and I don't think it's a bad turn. It shows even more raw honest humanity, of a kind of influence that perpetuates longer and deeper than the reign of the violent and the stuffy. It's hard to stand up in disagreement to our friends, when values that people around us hold dearly cause problems. It's hard to look at that amiable sincerity, that happy folksy confidence, and tell it unflinchingly that it's wrong. The fact that even Jim tolerates Tom's shenanigans although he makes no pretense of valuing it himself continues to tell a very powerful story of how much people will tolerate and even internalize systemic injustice which hurts them personally, when it's so thoroughly a backdrop of life, or when it's endorsed by our friends... and that is so very real, even in modern progressive circles.
Actually, I enjoyed the ending. What I mean is ultimately on the river away from traditional civilization he can become a friend to Jim. Once back with Tom in the more civilized world this freedom collapses. It becomes a show of indignity. Traditional values overcome the liberation Huck and Jim had developed on their travels. Even Huck is overcome by the institutional racism found in their civilization. The novel ends where it begins in a moral round trip.
I've always felt that when Huck says "I knew then that Jim was white inside" at the end of the book as Huck realizing that there was no difference between himself and Jim, or by extension no difference between white people and black people. Not that it's a good way to say it, it's a terrible wording, but it might have been the only way Huck could think of how to articulate it. That is just my opinion though.
I think you're very wrong on people naturally worshipping things John. Or at least that worship is the correct word. Perhaps people are often in awe of things but even then I don't think that's an inevitability.
There is always something that people use to determine right and wrong, what is worth spending resources on, etc. Whatever that is, that is what you worship.
Yet Nietzsche sought to become an Übermensch which represents being able to generate your own moral system identifying as good everything that came from your own "wil to power". Following his ideology technically counts as "worshiping" this way of living.
who here has read Huckleberry Finn? and not in a classroom? why can't Crash Course be more cool and cover famous books that are not boring. like Dune etc.
***** true but classics are more generally relatable to Western audiences. ex this book or the great gatsby etc. there are classics that anybody can enjoy like 1984 but they're incredibly rare.
I've always believed that the ending is symbolic of the civil war. Jim was freed (emancipation proclamation) but before that freeing had any effect, before he was free in reality, there had to be a struggle (the civil war.)
Pretty sure 96,2938495029468% of you people will NOT read that number Ha you didnt, right? If you didn't read it you didn't see there was a letter M Hidden in the Numbers! You just red the Numbers to check if there was a M in there but saw there wasn't !
To be fair, a lot of Twain's endings suck. For example: Connecticut Yankee, Pud'n head Wilson and No. 44 A Mysterious Stranger all had endings with tones very different to the rest of the story. That being said, No. 44 was never finished by Twain.... and Yankee was... well, Yankee was what it was. Funnily enough these are my favorite Twain pieces.
I think you nailed the ending pretty well. Individuals may manage to find ways of transcending socially ingrained prejudices, but eventually they have to come back to that same society, and there individual progress is not sufficient to change conditions. Ultimately I think it's a rejection of the American myth of the individual (or a small scrappy band) to better their condition as a solution to wider systemic problems.
I always felt that the ending was to showcase just how far Huck had come, how much he'd grown up, by putting him side by side with Tom, who is behaving childishly and cruelly. Huck still has more growing up to do, as the line about heading west and his complacency in the face of Tom's scheming show, but he has made progress.
I find John-from-the-past's comment on 'why can't it just be a river?' and present-John's answer quite interesting. It made me think quite a bit... See, I have the same reaction as past-John; I get quite annoyed by symbolism. My reaction is always "Seriously, it's a damn river! Pretty river and difficult river, but a river!" And then John says "You're gonna worship something". And I think we've hit the point. For me 'it's a damn river', because I worship facts, reality, Science. I may have missed the point here. I don't have much of a literature or philosophy oriented mind, but this was my immediate reaction, and I found it quite revealing about who I am as a person.
I spent all of my schooling thumping the "why does everything have to be a symbol" line... and now have come around to a deeper appreciation in later life. You don't always have to acknowledge the symbols, you can read for enjoyment and carry the gold from the straight-up read. But sometimes there IS an attempt to dig deeper at the less concrete elements of humanity, and the author has (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) woven symbolism into the surface story. Spotting them and rolling them around in your head. (I suspect John's sharing of poetry on Dear John and Hank has opened me up to this more.) As an agnostic who doesn't believe in god (I don't believe in it, but I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong), I frequently find it useful to see GOD itself as a symbol. That the idea of worshipping something doesn't have to literally mean worshipping a dude in the sky who created things. The idea of the river as a god might simply be a shorthand for talking about the river as a sense of something bigger than oneself, of being free, yet not totally under one's own control. Of being small in the universe of complexities we can only ever grasp slivers of. These are just some ideas that crossed my mind as I read your comments. Maybe they're useful. If not, thanks for reading at least! :)
Just to clarify, this wasn't meant to be any sort of refutation of your revelation. It's always neat to encounter a little "click" in understanding oneself a bit better!
@michiruEll that's a really good point! My brother is the same way. He is currently a junior in high school and constantly complains about how much english classes obsess over symbolism. I will definitely pass on your POV to him, maybe it'll help his frustration too. :)
To me the ending, among other things, is a point at how the romanticized version of a slave escaping does hurt a lot of people. The point is that Tom DOESN'T know any better. The romanticism causes the ignorant to see human beings as just characters, and not as real people with thoughts and feelings. Thus when they are still slaves: it becomes harder to empathize with them, because they've been reduced to mere characters. The reason Tom did that was because he thought that's how it was all supposed to go, and that the idea of a man gaining his freedom through a will was just too boring for him.
If there was a law that compelled the great writers to include a thesis at the end of their own works clearly explaining the themes and motives and such to be published, would you be For or Against that law? Why?
My MA thesis was about Twain's Huck Finn and that's exactly how I defended the book and criticized Hemingway's words. Twain wanted to show that no matter how genuine and truthful it is for a friendship to occur between a black and a white person during post civil war times, it can only exist outside of society and especially away from an antebellum setting, far from it, and also under the worst possible circumstances ever.
"You're going to worship something." To which I expect many would reply: I bow before nothing. Then I push them to their knees and yell: GROVEL BEFORE GRAVITY!
But is Huck actually aware of what’s happening? To do something might be different from understanding what you’re doing. And so maybe he wouldn’t just change suddenly in all different aspect of his communication because what was hasn’t yet hit the other aspects of his characteristics? He is just a kid with his own understandings.
heh, I see what you did there :3 As a literary work tho it's be a good one for the start of a season. Short so it's a good one to warm up with and there's a plethora of themes to explore
John green, just a strange idea about the end..... What if Twain was trying to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same? Just an idea
I'd always surmised that the ending simply meant that, no matter how well intentioned, people are largely fickle in the end. But that's just my fickle opinion. I'd like to hear your thoughts on Eudora Welty, "The Life You Save May be Your Own".
Your defense of "over reading" is weak. Very weak. "Everyone has to worship something." is not at all a true statement. Not every person is single-mindedly chasing after riches, love, or adventure. I'd argue that most people actually just want a healthy balance of those things and maybe some others. I, for one, am wading through life; that is to say that I have come to terms with my mortality, purposelessness, and insignificance. I do the things I do because I wish to do them, not because they are moral or to preserve my own well being per se, only because they my what I want and am able to do.
I think John's argument was that everyone has some things that they rank as more important than others, and that choosing to not interpret the river as a symbol is its own choice about what to worship (or what the characters are worshiping, or what the author wanted to say about worship). Saying "it's just a river" is a choice about what to see in the literature, just like not having any particular overarching worship-ideal is a choice as well. And all those choices have meaning.
Man, that crash course was an awesome one! I'd love to see even more videos on the topic. I feel like initiating a discussion group! Already got myself the ebook of hucks adventures, thanks John!
To me, the ending explores the question: how do you free someone who is already free? A paradoxical question seeing how slaves were not truly free after the Civil War.
It's good that there's cliff-notes like this, so that I can get a glimpse of what society finds important about literature. Most of the time I try to read fiction, I'll be like, "Wait, that's the end already? What happened? I saw people who went places and said things to other people, but I didn't really get the plot." When I tried this title at age 11, I think I might have gotten hung up on the vernacular speech. And my comprehension for fiction hasn't improved much since then. So I get my Lit credits on RU-vid now.
For me, the whole story had SOO many points. Some of them are mentioned in the video, and others are in my mind. About the ending chapters, it showed 2 things: 1. How 'educated' people are above 'intelligent' people, just because they think you have to 'go by the book', and define complex protocols for something, instead of just doing something right away, no matter how much it affects the others. 2. Even if blacks were already free (as a human being), and even if top white people knew it, they HAD to make them pass through terrible scenarios, and made them suffer, and do useless things (campaigns and votes etc), just to make some history out of it.
You should be ashamed. I'm a Missourian, too, who attended Culver-Stockton College decades ago. The college is about 20 miles north of Hannibal, MO. The college practically sits on the banks of the Mississippi River and is mentioned in Twain's book, Life on the Mississippi, along with other nearby towns. I read Twain from A to Z while at college. It was cool to literally walk in Twain's footsteps while reading his books. Every Tuesday afternoon around 5 PM, I would go down to the town's riverfront park and wait for the Delta Queen paddlewheel steamer as it rolled pass the town on its way to either New Orleans or Minneapolis. Twain would have loved it. :-)
I live in western Missouri, within driving distance of Kansas City. I think the only time I've been to the Mississippi river was when I was traveling out of state. However, taking the train from Kansas City so St. Louis is pretty cool because a large part of the trip is right on the banks of the Missouri river.
I don't believe worship is necessary. I would not say I worship anything. There are things I value, respect, believe, enjoy, and agree with, and I have methods I use to make decisions, including moral decisions, but none of that is the synonymous with worship. Despite that, I am alive and generally enjoy living.
I kind of wish crash course would release a list of the books they are going to cover before hand so we could read them previous to watching these videos... just a thought :D
1:10 Okay I gotta speak up, here. On behalf of all of us here at Atomic Gospel: God of the River. It is about a "God," Trilling wrote, "a power which seems to have a mind and will of its own, and which, to men of moral imagination; appears to embody a Great Moral Ideal." While this God of the River isn't necessarily GOOD, LOVE of it leads Huck toward GOODNESS, which you can see in the way Huck's voice is at it's most beautiful and poetic, when he's describing the River. Critics argue otherwise, but their view is maybe too ignorant of what it means that Huck's voice is led to beautiful and poetic places by the mere THOUGHT of the River. It means Huck is led toward GOODNESS by the God of the River, obviously. The God of the River is real, and it leads all who follow toward GOODNESS. Namaste
Huck's moral turmoil over whether or not to help Tom escape or to turn him in. In part Huck Finn the character is a metaphor for Americans. As a low born scruffy nardo'well and kid, he is at first pass an inferior and inept American. This is the heart versus conscience stuff. As a metaphor, his turmoil over his moral duty to rat on Tom is more about the Dred Scott Decision than it is about his personal feelings. The Dred Scott Decision and the Fugitive Slave Act effectively deputized every single American to be a slave catcher. You could be arrested, jailed and fined for refusing to help a slave chaser, not getting in his way, but for refusing to help if he demanded. So Huck's moral turmoil is mocking the false solemnity of these legal actions which are the shame of our nation. This bit is more for the first Huck Finn video, but no one's going to read it anyway. The issue of racism and Mark Twain has perhaps been solved by Ibram X. Kendi when he wrote How to be an Antiracist. It's a brilliant concept. I was once asked if I was a racist. We were sitting down eating lunch and only halfway through our food, so I had time for a longer answer. I said, As an American I've got things in my head I don't want to be there and that I'm probably not even aware of, but I'm doing everything I can to get past them. Or something like that. Darren said, 'Good answer.' The thing that I've learned about oppression is that it does it's most insidious harm when it convinces the target to wonder if there isn't something behind it. Kendi answers my answer with a much better answer. He accepts the insidiousness of centuries of racist thinking, and asks instead what are you doing about it? I may be drowning or not, the important thing is that I'm swimming. Are you drowning? is not really a yes or no question, it's best answer is to swim. Another author I like is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he would be considered the current high priest of stoicism, except us stoics don't go in for that thing. Taleb wrote Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. What he means is that our muscles don't get stronger because their good or naturally strong, they get stronger when we use them and use them hard. What's even better is that if you can just barely do a couple of reps at some weight, you don't just become able to lift that weight, you can usually lift more. Antiracism works that way too. So Mark Twain by writing a book that includes an unacceptable racist word, maybe be in fact racist; but that's not as important as the novel Huckleberry Finn being antiracist. See how that works? So what happens when the next right wing politician declares himself to be 'not a racist', or 'the least racist person'? Well, they can say that, they might even believe. If however you ask the more pertinent question 'Are you antiracist?' Well now it's put up or shut up time. What have you done in your life, what are you doing now that is antiracist? Opposing civil rights, making snarky remarks about various groups of people. Saying that you're protecting against 'voter fraud' when there are almost zero instances of that, and the rules you put in place are aimed at specific classes of people. (Which tested law says is illegal. The current Supreme Court majority hasn't gotten around to specifically bringing back Plessy v Ferguson) Well, I'm social distancing until the plaque blows over or kills us all. Ever hear of Depth and complexity? It's this educational tool. One day in class I used Harriet Tubman. She makes that Depth and Complexity stuff sing. When she was born, she was born a slave, but the owner of her mother had set her mother free in his will. His other beneficiaries just (illegally and unethically) kept this a secret. So legally she was a free person. When she was about 27 years old she escaped to Philadelphia. That was 1849. Across the border in a free state, she was effectively free, to capture her and return her to Maryland would've viewed in Pennsylvania as kidnapping. The next year 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Act, this made her vulnerable, not only to slave catchers, but now Federal Law said that anyone she met and certainly every government person should immediately arrest her. She was also now helping others to escape. Sometime after the Fugitive Slave Act and certainly with the Dred Scott Decision 1857, as well as her work helping others to escape made her a wanted felon in All the United States. (But she was still pretty much ignored as insignificant when she went back to Maryland). When the Civil War started she was at best no one. She volunteered and worked as a Union Army nurse for no pay. But when she got to South Carolina with her unit, she went back into the underground railroad business, talked with enslaved people, people who'd been freed by the Union military occupation of the sea islands. Using intelligence she'd gathered she led a Union raid on inland plantations freeing another 500 people. Eventually Abraham Lincoln invited her to the White House to meet her. There are action movies this wild that can't possibly be true. This woman had been treated completely illegally at great personal risk for all of her life until 1865. In a very real sense she's Huck Finn's sister. She certainly out imagined anything Tom Sawyer ever cooked up. Okay back to waiting out Covid-19... Did you do some of these on Daniel Dafoe, Samuel Pepys, Boccaccio? Might be time.. I've got a personal connection to more plagues than anyone would believe. I was in Montreal in 1980 and knew some of the Air Canada flight stewards written about by Randy Shilts in The Band Played On. In 2018 I got dysentery at the end of a 5 day hike through Dorsetshire, England. I spent two days in The Old House in Salisbury, 'working it out.' A month prior the Skirpals had been poisoned with a nerve agent two blocks away, and the Old House? Well it was already a century old when the 1665 Great Plague passed through and a few smaller less famous ones. Four months after my second stay there (I had to go back, I hadn't toured the cathedral) another couple were poisoned by the residual stuff left by the Russian assassins. The woman died. I was in China at the end of SARS, Cousin Huang took us to a farm village where they killed a couple of chickens and then cooked them up. That night when my son and I got back to the hotel in Taishan we saw on the TV news another village 20 kilometers away where they killed all the chickens and buried them in a trench. In 2009 back in China, this time it was N1H1, same as the 1918 'Spanish' flu. My son took off on a side trip and got sick. Before he could be picked up at a train station, he checked into the White Swan Hotel for 4-5 days and ate room service. My girlfriend and I were in Hong Kong in January and the first part of February this year. We had almost a front row seat. We were concerned we might be put into quarantine when we got back to the States. Immigration at LAX was a crowded joke. There were people in that crowd who we'd spoken to at the airport in Hong Kong who'd come from the mainland. Want to see a virus spread? That's how to do it. I self-quarantined for two weeks. Seemed the only responsible thing to do. And yep, I'm working on my Diary of the Plague. It's interesting how quickly things change and after a week it all begins to meld together. "Flatten the curve" is a week old. It may now be so ingrained in all our thinking that it no longer needs to be mentioned. Okay I'm yammering on. Hopefully if anyone reads this they get something out of it, or at least isn't bored.
I'm kinda confused about the hostility toward John's use of the word "worship"; the word may have religious connotations, but that itself doesn't mean the word is exclusively-religious. I have yet to met a person who didn't worship something, at least the way that John and David Foster Wallace described. Everyone values and admires something or someone supremely, it's a part of human nature. Are there exceptions? Absolutely, in the same way that there are individuals who lack the otherwise-universal trait of empathy. Here's Wallace's take on it: "Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
Yes. Someone already said it and yes, mispronunciation is kinda your thing; but the people here in Southern Illinois pronounce the city "Karo" like the syrup. Don't ask me why, I'm originally from "Chicawgo."
I never liked Tom Sawyer. He always came off as spoiled and selfish to me. Huck had more humanity than Tom. The ending was funny in some ways though. Like the racist townsfolk who thought Jim's scribblings were some kind of African language, It showed how ignorant they were.
this comment is more appropriate for part 1, but there is along history of what is the response to an unjust law. See Antigone by Sophocles all the way up to our own Jim Crow laws. And the current president of Turkey saying rebels can not have a proper Islamic burial. The precise law Creon gave out 300 or more years ago. Huck got it right. Antigone suffered the consequences for disobeying an unjust law.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
Actually the raft and the river serve as a substitute home for Huck. He escapes his father's wrath and the civilizing of the old lady. Having read the book in High School and now many years later I didn't realize how contrived it was. It took Twain the better part of 10 years to write it. Also when Huck comes to the realization that he'll go to hell, that's not him coming to some moral judgement. It's just Twain laughing at religion itself and showing it for the bad things it teaches.
Based on the other Twain books I have read, Huck Finn was absolutely awful. As though his publishing company just wanted him to hurry up and write something, so he penned this garbage in protest.
Not for nothin', but why is Me From The Past still a thing now that we've left behind CC History? He made sense there - he was there specifically to look at the idea that those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The whole thing doesn't really serve a purpose any more. Time for a new gimmick maybe?
