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.
Nice job!
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you focused on the connection Huck had with Emmeline Grangerford! I, myself, overlooked this relationship but I really enjoyed how you shed light on it. It showed Huck's sentimental side, which I thought didn't exist due to his stupidity in earlier chapters. It was also funny to hear your opinion on Twain's grammatical errors hahaha. Typcal Sam :') Although I love how you pointed Huck and Emmeline's "friendship" out, I find it hard to label it as one because a friendship to me is a mutual kind of thing and Emmeline doesn't really know Huck. But I can see where you're coming from! Overall, I think you did nicely :)
ReplyDeleteI didn't look at the relationship between Huck and Emmeline in that sense. I love how you put that into words and focused on that one topic. However, I have to agree with April on how I wouldn't consider them as being "friends". It's more of a connection Huck has with her and the poems she wrote. I thought it was more creepy than interesting that she wrote about the dead
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