Huck Finn #3 (Chapters 16 - 22)

So, chapters 16 - 22. Exciting, right?
...
Yeah, let me just get this over with as quickly and painlessly as possible.
That whole family feud business had plenty of great examples of betrayal. Lots of (sometimes literal) backstabbing, murder, and all that exciting stuff. But in all honesty, I don't care about betrayal here. What I was most attracted to in this section of the book was one part in particular, and I think it's one of the strongest portrayals of a friendship we've seen in Huckleberry Finn so far.
What I'm typing about is, of course, the relationship between Huck and the late Emmeline Grangerford. To save the trouble of checking your book, that would indeed be the deceased teenage daughter of the Grangerford family. From the end of page 122 to page 126, Huck tells us all about young Emmeline. He describes her work, the peculiar portraits and poems she wrote in honor of the dead. Additionally, Huck explains that her room is still untouched. The part that really got me about this whole little passage was when he mentions going up to her room and leafing through her scrapbooks. Then he says "Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some about her, now that she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two..." (Twain, 125). I can't really put into words what I liked about this part any better than this. It just seemed so meaningful and nice, you know? And it was nice of Huck.
Then again, I really just like angst. Whatever.
*Side note that actually has nothing to do with the passage but still kind of relevant to our lives at the present moment:*
Just so everybody is aware, there is an absolutely ridiculous run-on sentence on page 140. It starts with "The first thing to see..." and goes on for the whole rest of the paragraph without a single period. I triple-checked. It's just irritating that Twain gets special privilege because he's writing a so-called work of literary genius (which isn't actually all that great, let's be real), but the second anybody else uses a measly semicolon it's like a disembodied voice shouts "There goes your literacy!" I mean, how annoying is this? I say we start a protest.

Huckleberry Finn Chapters 6 - 16

Forgive me for skipping around randomly, I'm covering a lot of chapters here. Anyway, I think that chapter six and/or seven is where the action really takes off. In April's last journal entry (which I unfortunately can't link you to because of several reasons), she brought up the point that Huck's dad embodies betrayal by not being a good father to Huck, by beating on him, etc. I thought that was a really good point and so I wanted to mention it because it continues at least through to chapter six. Huck does run away, and he meets with Jim The Slave again. And that brings us right into the friendship part of this entry! So, I wouldn't exactly say Huck and Jim have a "friendship" - there's plenty of communicating and even some bonding, but I really feel like there is no trust on either side of the spectrum, so to speak. Trust, to me, is necessary for a friendship to be legitimate. I don't see any real trust there.

Ending with a quote because I need one, let's just say that I found Huck telling Jim that "I wouldn't want to be nowhere but here" (Twain 51) to be a really rad, friendshippy thing to be said. 

Huckleberry Finn - "Friendship and Betrayal" Blog #1 (Chapters 1 - 5)

First thing's first: shout-out to Miss Watkins for assigning us a book that I don't hate already. Guess good ol' Sam Clemens should get some recognition as well while we're on the topic. Anyway, onto the actual point of this. The themes I'm supposed to be taking pointed notice of while reading the novel are those of friendship and betrayal. Even though we've only read through the first five chapters, I think that it's pretty obvious that this book is going to a veritable gold mine of both.
As is true in most situations, friendship seems like a reasonable place to start here. So, I'm pretty sure we've all read the prequel to Huckleberry Finn, otherwise known as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Throughout that novel, Tom and Huck's friendship developed in a very noticeable fashion. The two boys go from being acquaintances who enjoy one another's company because they're misunderstood little twelve-year-olds who don't have middle school experiences and My Chemical Romance to counteract their whining and angsting. This relationship seems to have carried over into Huckleberry Finn. We see almost from the very beginning of the novel that Tom and Huck are still friends - best friends, even. Daydreaming together, meeting in the woods with the other boys and planning to lead a pack of robbers are but a mere handful of the shenanigans these boys pull off before the real plot even begins.
Additionally, I think friendship shows its face in the form of that whole little anecdote about the rise and fall of "Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take and oath and write his name in blood." (Twain, 7). I just think that entire situation - boys playing together in the woods, wanting to cause trouble and generally having a great time - has legitimate undertones of friendship even if said undertones may not be the strongest.
None of the other characters have really exhibited friendly feelings towards another yet save for the widow caring for Huck, but I consider that more maternal instinct or familial love than anything else.
Now, onto the main event.
Well, that may be exaggerating a little. Still, there must be a reason that Taylor Swift writes more songs about being stabbed in the back than hugged by a friend, right? Betrayal is interesting.
However, it has yet to make a huge appearance in the novel. You could probably make an argument for little betrayals here and there, such as Huck's blatant and repeated disrespect for the widow's rules as well as her beliefs (though he doesn't intentionally disrespect her faith).
That's about all I got for now. I know Miss Watkins told us that friendship/betrayal will be a major theme when Huck finally runs away with Jim the slave and has all that quality internal conflict. Not going to lie, I'm looking forward to things getting a little more interesting. Also, my prediction is that Huck's dad is going to bring on the betrayal in a big way at some point, possibly soon but there are literally hundreds of pages of possibility so who really knows?