Friday, April 26, 2013

Huck Finn is overrrr


The truth will set you free, or in the case of Jim and Huck, the exact opposite.  It seems like every time the two partners get into trouble to only way out is a good old Huck Finn lie.  Tom, Huck, and Jim are all enslaved by their adventurous ideas.  Well, Jim is also enslaved because he’s black and they had him chained to a bed.  The trio is able to escape and become free until Tom is shot in the leg.  Jim must then go into hiding again because of the whole runaway slave thing.  Obviously, if this were a different historical period Jim would not have to hide.  But, he is forced out of hiding to help save Tom’s life…and then he goes back to being a slave.  Are all the men on this “expedition” enslaved to each other?  Jim wasn’t that close with Tom and he could have just let him die, but he didn’t.  The boys also seem to find great freedom in sneaking out.  When they are all alone at night, it almost seems as if that is the only time that they are ever truly free.  They are living a lie and the only time that they are not slaves to the fake life that they have created is when no one else is around.  The only time that Jim is truly and honestly free is when Tom reveals that Miss Watson has set him free in her will.  This clearly ends his enslavement.  With the book being done, we have been able to look at freedom vs enslavement through various lenses, including the main one of historical with the whole black people slave thing that we had going on for like 200 years.  Yeah…

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Kevin! Hope your weekend is going good. Glad to say we made it to the end of this story. At times it was hard to actually have the motivation to sit down and read it but now we all know how it ends. I see we both realized that Tom already knew Jim was free but continued this plan anyways. Like you said knowing that truly confirms that Jim is now a free man and although he did run away he had a good reason for it anyways.

Unknown said...

Hi Kevin hope you had a good weekend. What you said in your final blog post was absolutely true. I did also see that Jim was clearly enslaved by uncle Silas. They chained him to a bed post. I see him more as a prisoner than a slave. Well he was an enslaved prisoner. When Tom came along in the picture, I did see that each other was enslaving each other. Tom was enslaving Huck through his knowledge, Jim was enslaving Huck by his friendship (not that is a bad thing ) and Huck and Jim both enslaved Tom by the runaway part.

Unknown said...

Hey Kevin!! Hope your weekend was great. This book was amazing and I was amazed at how much it concentrated on Freedom and enslavement. I think you were definitely right about looking through the different lenses for this book. The best lenses that we could look through are the historical lenses. You were absolutely right when you said that if Jim was in a different time period, he would have been fine. If he was in Bloomfield, New Jersey, he would not have been considered a slave. This book was an amazing book to read and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.