Journal #12 Mark Twain: That Darn Pap!

QUOTE:

“’Don’t you give me none o’ your lip,’ says he. ‘You’ve put on considerble many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. Your educated, too, they say; can read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you’” (Twain 120).


SUMMARY:

Pap catches up with Huck and decides to drag him down to his own low level. He doesn’t want Huck to be any “better,” and he only wants the money Huck has.


RESPONSE:

Twain creates an uneasy feeling right before Pap returns, and it’s almost like reading a thriller or scary novel. At first it seems pretty silly when Jim gets out his magic “hair-ball” that has a spirit inside of it, but it actually predicted the future! (Or did it??) I don’t know whether Jim already knew Pap was back or not, but assuming that he didn’t, this is definitely the part of the book that puts me into “movie-mode.” I’ve always liked books that can create a vivid picture in my mind (and it seems like almost everything I’ve read in the last class as well as this one have become little movies in my brain), so this part of the story helped to hook me into reading more.

From this point on in the story, however, I started to get more and more frustrated with Pap. I couldn’t wait to read how Huck finally escapes, and of course he fakes his own death! That must be a running theme for Twain because I think Tom Sawyer ends up at his own funeral in his book? I guess the idea of a person faking his or her own death is pretty fascinating. I wonder if Twain found the idea fascinating as well, so he wrote about it in his books? However, it seems like a pretty tricky situation to “stay dead” once Huck plants all of the evidence. I actually thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” when Pap passes right by Huck in the skiff. Even though I already knew that Huck escaped, I was still uneasy reading this whole part.