Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Huck chapters 23-30

The show that the King and the Duke put on was defiantly not for children.  The Duke took care of the door until the theater couldn’t hold any more men..  He then went to the stage through the back and started to work up the crowd about how this was going to be a great tragedy.  At the point that the crowd couldn’t take anymore, the king came out on all fours, painted with stripes and naked.  The crowd laughed and howled and the Duke dropped the curtain.  He said that they will only be performing for two more nights due to prior engagements.  The crowd, not taking this news well, asked, Is that all?  They were about to cause an riot until one big man got up and said, We don’t want to be the laughing stock of the town, so we should sell up the show so that everyone else will be fooled too, so we are not the only ones that are fools.  So the second night went ok, but the third night the townspeople were ready with rotten food to throw.  The Duke got a man to watch the door for a minute, while he and Huck started to speed walk to the raft after they got out of the theater.  They discovered that the king wasn’t in the town at all and all of them escaped by the raft with everything going according to plan.  They took in 465 dollars for the three nights.  After The Duke and King fell asleep, Jim started to question how the King and Duke acts, that they were rapscallions.  Huck said that most royalty is like that.

So after sleeping The Duke and The Kings tried to come up with some plan.  They dressed up Jim in some of the costume left over from King Lear, and put a sign up in front of his wigwam calling him a sick Arab.  Soon the group bought some new cloths and started to head for a town, deciding to start a a plan once they get there.  They saw a steamboat floating above the city and decided to take a boat to it.  A young man rode with them, which the King decided to ask for information.  Comes to find out that a rich man named Peter Wilks died and that his brothers William and Harvey were being waited for in the town.  The king asked the man all the information that he could about the town until he drained all information.  Then Huck and the crew came ashore and flagged down another Boat towards the village, where when they got there the King introduced himself and the Duke as William and Harvey.  They were informed of Peter’s death and started to mourn.  They also meet the three nieces of Peter, one which was named Mary-Jane.  Everyone was fooled by them, except for the doctor, who didn’t believe the Kings English accent.  After a while the money peter left behind was found and the king hid it under his bed, but Huck started to feel bad about deceiving the Nieces, especially Mary-Jane, so he took the money and hid it in the coffin.  Soon after wards Huck tells Mary-Jane the Truth and the real brothers show up.  Since the village people can’t tell the difference, they decide to use the body to decide through identification.  But while on the way to the body, Jim surprised the party and they were able to escape.  Then The King and The Duke start to fight amongst themselves, until they got drunk.

Human beings, on individual levels, have the capacity to do very good things, but we as a group tend to be very horrible.  Case in point with Huckleberry Finn, If only one person got fooled, he wouldn’t spend effort in getting the whole town to be tricked too just so he wouldn’t be the only fool.  But since a large group of people were fooled, they decided to fool the rest of the town out of their money so that they won’t be the only fools.  They didn’t care that they were indirectly taking money from their fellow neighbors, they just cared that they didn’t look like fools, which was really selfish.  The Village shouldn’t focus all of their anger at Huck’s crew as much as they should towards the first group that saw the show.  If they didn’t lie and just told the truth about the show, then they would not have loosed so much money.  Instead of trying to help their fellow man, they dragged them down with them.  This is something called the crab effect, which is basically a story about a Crab trying to escape from a pot, but his fellow crabs drag him back down repeatedly.  We see the crab effect sometimes in our culture, even sometimes towards college.  Sometimes people will make comments like “oh you think you are better than me because you are going to college?” or they discourage you from going all together.  It might be because they don’t want you to succeeded, that they don’t want you to advance in what your goal is.  This effect is not only limited to college.  Instead of being happy for a friend who won a new car, someone might say “oh why does he get a new car and I don’t” and they might decide to damage the car in some way.  I think that it is a sad condition.  Now my feelings towards The Duke and The King officially changed after they decided to impersonate the brothers of a dead man.  At first their tricks were not on a personal level.  They trick a whole town through a play and the trick worked because a few people in town didn’t want their pride and image hurt.  But through impersonating the Peter Wilks’s brothers, they are playing of a small group of people’s grief, especially the three nieces.  It was at this point that I came to the realization that they could have done this in the past.  How many other people’s lives they have ruined in the past?  They try to rationalize their own actions to themselves by say that the Girl’s will be alright because they will have their house, but that doesn’t justify what they tried to do.  Actually getting to know the victims enforces the fact to the reader that what they are doing is harmful.  Their last victims were a crowd.  It is hard to identify with a crowd because they are a mass.  But an individual is easier to identify with.  An Individual you can find out their history, get to know their personality and see the effect that your actions have.  A crowd usually express one emotion, don’t really have much of a personality and the actions of a crowd usually doesn’t have an effect on an individual level, except for the target of the mob.

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