Huckleberry Finn 5: P129-156

I. Quotations
1. "If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way." (page 137)

• Living at the foot of the social ladder, pap knows very clear that he, and people like him, is feeble in front of those social practices that were established a long time ago. The world is filled with a bunch of hypocrites; and the way to get along with those kind of people is to "let them have their own way" (137). This social laissez-faire policy is simply a denial of righteousness and justice. How dreadful it is that the philosophy of life at that time is to lie: lies to cover up lies; lies to overcome lies - one has to lie in order to survive! Everyone lies in this novel, but it is not their fault. When the society is corrupted as a whole, the stander of morality would be lowered; therefore, lying would not be a guilt because everyone is doing it. It is a pathetic world after all.
  

2. "Dat's all right, den. I doan't mine one er two kings, but dat's enough. Dis one's powerful drunk, en de duke ain' much better." (page 146)

• Jim feels unhappy because he thinks his freedom was taken away by the white men again. How cruel and unfair it is to say that "handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim [...] Ropes are the correct thing" (146)? Paradoxically, the king and the duke are claiming that they should treat Jim like that in order to "preserve the unities, as we say on the boards" (146). Little do they know that the union cannot be preserved when injustice (slavery) exist. This is a correlation to the Civil War, which the Union did not preserve when the South held onto their tradition of slaveholding. The duke and the king, as a representation of white adults, want to dominate the young and the black, although Huck and Jim are actually the owners of the raft. Therefore, the Quads on the Raft is not going to last forever.
  

II. Vocabulary
1. galoot - [n.] an awkward, eccentric, or foolish person
Ex. "Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft." (130)

2. tartar - [n.]
1> a member of any of the various tribes, chiefly Mongolian and Turkish, who, originally under the leadership of Genghis Khan, overran Asia and much of eastern Europe in the Middle Ages
2> a savage, intractable person
3> an ill-tempered person
Ex. "I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth." (100)