Reader Response 3: Huck Finn (14 – 18)

Huck is very impressed with the Grangerford’s house. “I hadn’t seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style.” (Chapter 17, Page 75, Paragraph 5) I think that he is so impressed with the Grangerford’s house because he probably hasn’t ever been in a nice house before. I think that Huck understands that just because you have money and someone doing everything that you ask them to it doesn’t mean that you are happy because in (Chapter 18, Page 80, Paragraph 5) Huck said that his slave had a “monstrous easy time” because he wasn’t used to having anyone do anything for him, but Buck’s was “on the jump most of the time.”

The significance of the books in the room is that Huck was interested in what they were about. I think that it shows that Huck now wants to learn because in the beginning of the book he didn’t want to go to school and now he was interested in what the books were saying. “I read considerable in it now and then.” (Chapter 17, Page 76, Paragraph 2) Also, Huck was describing what each book was about as if he had read them all already. I think that Huck now understands that an education is important to have because when he was arguing with Jim, he seemed to be getting frustrated that Jim didn’t know what he was talking about. “I see it warn’t no use wasting words – you can’t learn a black man to argue. So I quit.” (Chapter 14, Page 60, Paragraph 9) I think that Mark Twain doesn’t like uneducated people and thinks that an education is important because throughout the book he has been making fun of people that don’t know what they are talking about.

The pictures and poems are significant because in all of the pictures they are somehow connected to death or sadness. The girl that drew these pictures and wrote these poems seems to be obsessed with death. One of the things about the picture that is significant is that the woman that is about to jump off of a bridge and she is wearing white and in the other picture the woman is wearing all black. Another significance is that there are three different ways that the girl pictured the woman about to jump off of the bridge. I think that Mark Twain went into such detail because he really wanted us to realize how this girl was feeling but the family was too blind to see the real meaning behind the pictures. I think that Mark Twain thought that what Emmeline was doing was a way to remember people that have past away. Huck is touched by Emmeline’s art and poetry because he tried to write a poem and he wasn’t very good at it. “I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn’t seem to make it go, somehow.” (Chapter 17, Page 78, Paragraph 2)