| Chapter 31: "Shaking The Frauds" |
| Contributor: Courtney Love |
| A Summary of Events |
- Huck, Jim, the duke and the king stay on the raft for a few days to pass the towns that know about The Royal Nonesuch.
- The frauds stop a few times doing small tricks, but don’t earn enough money, so they begin to plan and make Huck and Jim worry.
- They stop one morning outside a small town named Pikesville. In the town, the king and the duke get in a fight, and Huck runs back to the raft in an attempt to leave the frauds behind.
- When he gets to the raft Huck can’t find Jim. A boy tells him that a stranger (the king) had found the runaway and sold him for forty dollars to Silas Phelps.
- Huck writes a letter to Miss Watson telling her where Jim is, but then changes his mind and tears it up, deciding that he would rather go to hell.
- Huck runs into the frauds and the duke lies to him about where Jim is.
- Huck pretends to start for the country where the duke told him to find Jim, but turns around and heads for the Phelps’s plantation.
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| Characters Involved |
- Huck
- Jim
- The duke
- The king
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| Two Discussion Questions |
- When Huck refers to Jim as his “property” (217) is it part of his act convincing the duke, or does it show Huck’s difficulty with change on the idea of slavery?
- How have Huck’s views on religion changed since the beginning of the book?
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| Two Important Passages |
- “That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly” (213).
- This passage shows how Huck feels about helping a runaway slave. Huck thinks of himself as a bad person for helping Jim, and believes that he is running away from the disgrace of it all, but yet he never does anything about it, making the reader wonder if this is what Huck truly believes.
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- “…I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute…and then says to myself:
‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ – and tore it up” (215).
- This is a monumental decision Huck makes between sending the letter telling Miss Watson where Jim is, and sticking by his friend. It’s important because Huck believes that what he is doing is wrong, and thinks that he won’t be able to pray until he confesses, so the idea that Huck would give all that up shows a lot about his friendship with Jim. So far this point is one of Huck’s largest moral decisions, and it emphasizes his growth and change from his original attitude towards slavery.
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| Controversial Elements |
- Huck cries when Jim’s missing from the raft
- Huck tells the boy that Jim is violent
- The king sells Jim for only $40
- Huck thinks of writing a letter to Miss Watson, but is worried what the people in his town will think of him
- Huck claims that he “felt so good and all washed clean of sin” after writing the letter to Miss Watson telling her where Jim is
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