![]() ![]() After the raftsmen’s boasts and story-telling are finished, Huck is accidentally found hiding in a woodpile at the far edge of the raft at the edge of the firelight he is roughly pulled from his hiding place and, while naked, interrogated and threatened. The relative neglect of the raftsmen’s passage in Huckleberry Finn commentary is surprising when we consider the traumatic heart of the episode. In many ways, the raftsmen’s passage is a bit like Huck Finn himself, a kind of outcast child of the parental body of the book. Twain scholarship has reached no consensus on how the passage should be handled editorially, much less on the meaning of the passage for the novel as a whole. Jim got down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened."Commentary on the “raftsmen’s passage” section of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) usually centers on the conundrum of whether or not to include it as part of the text of the novel’s chapter 16. Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. What I wanted to know was, what he was going to do, and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor. ![]() So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything. Miss Watson’s nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. ‘There you see it says ‘for a consideration.’ That means I have bought it of you and paid you for it. Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says: You want to SELL all your property to me - not give it. ‘Please take it,’ says I, ‘and don’t ask me noth-ing - then I won’t have to tell no lies.’ ![]()
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