(np) HF, the payoff of not being completely d*ckish...

[Michael Bailey]

> . .  . this argument doesn't demonstrate that Jim isn't asleep; it asserts that someone other than Jim wouldn't have fallen asleep. Jim is either asleep or some words in the text make the reader understand that he is awake and deciding to let Huck get away for some fun. It has been a couple of years, but I don't recall anything that made me as a reader believe Jim is awake.
>

I'm big on people knowing stuff & not letting on.   I did a paper on -
egads, I just realized I did 3 different papers on different books for
different classes, with that premise each time.

so I might be predisposed to thinking so here also!


But anyway, as to believing everything Huck says...

Huck puts forth several "facts" such as killing a spider is bad luck
and so forth.  He's as superstitious as he believes Jim to be, and
maybe Jim is.  Huck's first person narrative is meant to wander around
the truth and approach it humorously and from many directions.

I think we are supposed to know more than he does, at least sometimes.

The text gave me this description of Jim falling asleep:

"So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom.  He leaned his back
up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most
touched one of mine.  My nose begun to itch.  It itched till the tears
come into my eyes.  But I dasn't scratch.  Then it begun to itch on
the inside. Next I got to itching underneath.  I didn't know how I was
going to set still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven
minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that.  I was itching in
eleven different places now.  I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a
minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try.  Just
then Jim begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore—and then I was
pretty soon comfortable again."

Using my imagination to picture what's in the text carried me further:

he's so close their legs are almost touching.

It's only a couple minutes.  No way is he sleeping.  No way did he not
see them.

Black slaves in antebellum Missouri had more reason than most people
to be "practiced in the arts of deception".
Having one's owners think one stupid had survival value.

A man muddled enough to fall asleep in six or seven minutes after
hearing a prowler and not being fully satisfied that he's  safe, would
be somebody who could be sold down the river before he knew it.

But that's not what happens to Jim...as we know...


I'm not going to push this any harder, as if I haven't already...

it's an enticing possibility but, sticking closer to Huck's
perception, let's just say that it's a mournful spooky night -- and
really really dark -
and Jim is in the doorway listening to the same sounds that have Huck
in a "brown study":

"the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl,
away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill
and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind
was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it
was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the
woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to
tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself
understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about
that way every night grieving."

the kind of a night that spooky things happen in!  that's why he
couldn't sleep...assuming he's as superstitious as Huck...and so
forth...


Anyway, Jim undeniably makes a small happening into a big story, and
embroiders it noticeably even to Huck -

"Afterwards Jim said the witches be witched him and put him in a
trance, and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the
trees again, and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it.  And next
time Jim told it he said they rode him down to New Orleans; and, after
that, every time he told it he spread it more and more, till by and by
he said they rode him all over the world, and tired him most to death,
and his back was all over saddle-boils.  Jim was monstrous proud about
it, "

But this is a thing, this is the beginning of Jim as a person to
reckon with.  This incident de-objectified Jim.

Imagine being a slave...would I have the courage to challenge that
interpellation?  I doubt it, unless somebody egged me on.  Or some
story, true or even fictional...