Huck Finn 32 to end

As in the early chapters of this book Tom Sawyer again serves as a teacher to Huck in these chapters. Tom creates a wild plan to free Jim. Huck recognizes the foolishness and potential danger of Tom’s plan and says it could get the three of them killed. It is not surprising that Tom’s willingness to help free Jim confuses Huck, Tom has always concerned himself with conforming to social expectations and preserving his own reputation. Freeing Jim would seem to be bad on both counts. Huck willing to trade his life and reputation for Jim, thinks of himself as a poor, worthless member of white society. Huck sees Tom’s life as worth something more than that and believes that Tom has something to lose by helping to free Jim. In the end, though, we sense that Tom has no concept of the life and death importance of Jim’s freedom but instead just views the effort simply as one big opportunity for fun and adventure.Twain makes a comment on the harsh racism of the South in the exchange between Sally and Huck about the explosion on the steamboat. When Sally asks if anyone was hurt in the explosion. It is unclear whether Huck is simply role playing or mimicking the attitudes of an average white Southern boy in pretending to be Tom. Sally, is racist in her response, saying that it’s fortunate no one was hurt when she has just learned that a black man lost his life. In these chapters, Tom, Huck and Jim in many ways act like the roles they played at the beginning of the novel. Tom once again gets caught up in his romantic ideas of valiantly rescuing Jim, which are frustrating when we see how long they delay Jim’s escape. Tom gets so caught up in his imagination that he and Huck almost forget why they are going to so much trouble. Huck, for his part, refers to the same follower status in relation to Tom that he held at the beginning of the novel. Both Tom and Huck get so enthralled in their game that they seem to forget that Jim is a human being. To the boys, he becomes almost an object , to the extent that they even ask him in all seriousness to share his quarters with snakes and rats. Imprisoned in the shed, Jim is just as captive and powerless as he was before he originally escaped. The ending of the book shows Tom to be even more manipulative than we realized. The bullet in Tom’s leg seems rather deserved when Tom reveals that he has known all along that Miss Watson has been dead for two months and that she freed Jim in her will. Tom’s confession reveals a new depth of cruelty, he treats blacks only a little better than slaveholders do, using Jim as a plaything to indulge in a great adventure. Tom’s claim that he meant to pay Jim for his troubles is surely of little to anyone with money is deeply insulting. No one ever chastises Tom for his behavior. Instead he turns the bullet , the symbol of the fine line between fun and foolishness and he proposes to Huck that they go look for more adventures among the Injuns another people oppressed by whites.