Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter 17 - 20
Huck finds his way to the door of a large house, whose owners call off the dogs after confirming that he is not a member of the Shepherdson family. Huck is warmly welcomed into the house, and he makes up a spurious background for himself as he attempts to explain how he found his way to this part of the region. He learns that he has been taken in by the Grangerford family, as he spends time with Buck Grangerford, a boy who is similar in age to Huck. He describes in great detail the beautiful home of the family, and their polite manner, which includes assigning him a personal slave like the other members of the family.
Huck also learns about the recently deceased Emmeline, a fourteen-year-old girl from the family who had been renowned for her tributes to the deceased that was so prompt that she often arrived before the undertaker. Huck describes Colonel Grangerford in great detail and learns about a feud that had existed between the Shepherdson family and the Grangerford family. Buck, like the other members of his family, takes the feud quite seriously, but he is unable to explain the reason for the dispute when Huck attempts to learn it.
Huck is surprised by the nature of the feud, as both families visit the same church, although they leave their guns at the church doors as they listen to the preacher sermonize about brotherly love. Huck is led into the swamps by his slave, who shows him the place where Jim has been hiding, and Jim informs Huck that he has managed to retrieve most of their belongings along with their raft. Jim has been hiding in the marshes where the dogs cannot find him, and he has been aided by the slaves of the Grangerford family. Later, Huck learns that one of the Grangerford girls has eloped with a young man from the Shepherdson family, and he witnesses the bloodshed that accompanies that disaster. Huck watches Buck get into a gunfight with the Shepherdsons and he is unable to help when Buck is shot dead along with his companion.
Huck and Jim go back to the river and spend many a quiet day floating down the river until they run into a pair of men who seem to run away from people. The two men are con men whose tricks have been revealed to the town of their latest victims, and Huck catches onto this information rather quickly. The younger man of the two decides to pass himself off as a duke, while the other, who also happens to be much older, feels left out and claims to be a king. They take over the wigwam after learning Huck’s convincing but untruthful story about why he’s traveling with Jim. They are both reduced to a servile role as the two con men take over their raft, and begin to devise money-making plans. They stop in the next town where the older man claims to be a reformed pirate at a revival meeting and expresses his desire to bring Christianity to the pirates of the Indian Ocean. The gullible townspeople take up a collection for him, and he manages to make a significant amount of money. The duke on the other hand makes money by creating fake subscriptions from a printer’s shop, and he also creates a fake wanted poster for Jim that would allow them to travel during the day since they would be able to disguise Jim as a runaway slave.
Analysis
Huck’s interactions with the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons further develop Huck’s character as a rational and free thinker who does not get bogged down by illogical rules. Huck is unable to understand how people like the Grangerfords can keep up with the business of a bloody feud without being able to understand the true cause of it. He also observes the irony of the family’s shared practice of Christianity but yet they carry guns to the service. He fails to understand how the churchgoers can appreciate the sermon of brotherly love just as they take up their arms again and resume the brutal business of killing one another over a senseless feud. This idea of death is also developed in the character of Emmeline, who seems to be obsessed with the idea of death. In this section, Twain attempts to highlight the moral corruption of those individuals that choose to practice religion devoutly but are unable to practice rational morality.
In Huck’s interaction with the con men, the reader is reminded of the precarious position in which he finds himself. He claims that he chooses to play along with their farce as a means to keep the peace, but it is evident that he does not have the wherewithal to restore order and control over the vessel given the fact that he is a child traveling with a runaway slave.
