I'm having trouble relating mistaken identity to the characters and plot of Huck Finn. I know that there are a lot of instances where Huck takes on a different identity to fool strangers on land. Huck uses the alias of "Sarah Mary Williams" and "George Jackson". By being Sarah Willaims, Huck is able to learn priceless information about his hometown and how the town is dealing with his faked death. Without doing this he wouldn't have known that his father was a suspect and had disappeared, or that Jim was being hunted. The identity of George Jackson allowed Huck to experience the "perfect family" that he had always wanted. Huck was taken into the Grangerfords family and treated as one of their own. Through the eyes of George Jackson, Huck saw how it was to be in a family dynamic but unfortunetly also witnessed the death of this family. Without becoming George Jackson he wouldn't have been able to see that even the "perfect family" has it's struggles and imperfections. Huck isn't the only character to adopted false personas. The king and the duke take on different identities to fool the townspeople into watching their comedy show and to fool the Wilks family.
I don't think that these cases of mistaken identity are the same as the ones in The Prince and the Pauper or Pudd'nhead Wilson. I'm not sure what Twain was exactly trying to accomplish by having Huck use so many different aliases. Why couldn't Huck use one alias during all his adventures? In The Prince and the Pauper and Pudd'nhead Wilson, mistaken identity is part of the main plot and is the basis of the story. But this isn't the same for Huck Finn. Why did Mark Twain put this into the story? Aren't the characters safe when they are so far from their home town?
I wonder if Huck really "wants" to be apart of the perfect family, or if it just comes easily when they welcome him so. He is happy to see Jim even after he's been so accepted into the family and he does question their way of life here and there (Religious books, dead daughter). I think that Twain gives Huck these many identities to show how easy it is to put on clothes and fit in for Huck and in order to allow for him to meet these people and go through these adventures. In other words, it could be a plot device in order to move the story along to each adventure down the river?
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to consider how easily Huck can enter these kind of roles while Jim is always hiding, pretending to be captured, or wearing an elaborate disguise. Huck can be "sivilized," or white trash with Pap, or a Grangerford gentleman, or a boy with a sick father, or anything else really, the list goes on and on. Jim is either a runaway slave, a caught slave, or a "crazed Arab" with blue make-up on, all marinalized segments of society. The duke can be royalty, or a pirate, or an actor, an englishman, or a scoundrel. Jim is the only one who can't move freely between many roles. It's odd how the difference between king and rapscallion is really nothing but the difference between slave and anything else is so vast.
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