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

[alice wellintown]

The arguments you've used thus far are wonderful, and the points you
are arguing about the characters and the tone and the themes and the
language are excellent. Thank you. I'm glad I didn't miss this. I'm
not gonna quibble with you on a plot detail. Now, you've made a lot of
this opening scene and I happen to agree with those who argue that
opening scenes and chapters are super important, and I wonder how this
scene fits next to several scenes that Twain parallels with it. In
several scenes characters fall asleep or are said to fall asleep and
are tricked by others. The scene here, the one you explicated for us,
as I said above and I suspect you must also believe, is a very
important scene. Later, when Huck and Jim get caught in the fog, a
critical scene on several levels, including the basic plot level
because the two are travelling not North but South on the mightily
Miss., and will miss the Ohio merge where Jim needs to disembark, Huck
will again tell us and Jim that Jim was asleep and dreamed it all,
then ask Jim to tell us his dream. Jim tells all, but insists that he
was not sleeping (and to add insult to injury, Huck accused Jim of
drinking and having fallen asleep in a drunken stupor) or drinking.
The tale telling, tall tale telling, the stretches and lies theme is
one you mentioned in your reading of that "sleeping" under the tree
scene, and it too is super important... well now I'm gonna lose my
trout lines here, but Huck, as you first argued, raised by a drunk
single father, white trash who is envious of free blacks and the
educated who can vote (Harper Lee's Mr. Cunningham), applies the
strategies that work on Pap to Jim here. Another of this parallel
scenes involves Pap asleep in drunken stupor waking up to Huck's
tricks, but, of course, Jim is not Pap, Jim is not dull or
wet-brained, but sharp, and as you suggest, he is, not to get too far
into the lit-crit debate over this, a trickster who knows a trick ot
two when he is giving or getting or signifying, and so Jim is only
taken in by Huck's hustle and huckstering, because of the strange
power white has given to the teen here and taken from the man.
Nevertheless, as Jim is not Pap, he does try to raise and civilize
Huck. The scene I noted previously, when Huck is in drag, drags out
the tale Jim tells of beating his deaf daughter. Jim's guilt motivates
him to Free himself and his family, but also makes him, ironically, a
good mother and father to the lad. That Huck can still manipulate Jim
is not only down to the white power he abuses here, but also to Jim's
Noble motives. Jim, no Noble savage, loves. And love, even in Twain's
ironic tale, is still able to save, if not all the lonely people,
those who, in the end, make the love they take.