the style= :)

I’ve never read Huck Finn before this class. Considering I thought it was about a whale when I started it, my views are rapidly changing as I read.  I am mildly obsessed with the writing style.  I love how it feels like Huck is just telling me a story out loud.  It gives me the feeling that he is just spitting out details that he remembers and doesn’t realize the larger picture to what he’s saying, but I as the reader can make larger inferences than it seems like he is while he's telling it to me.

It reminds me of a friend telling a story where the patterns of their experience aren’t clear to them, but by speaking it aloud the patterns end up being clear enough to me that I can give advice back or maybe just a summary of what they did in a funny way to make them come to some sort of realization about their experience (this is much less guidance counselor-y than it sounds).  

My reading is evolving to recognize those patterns better and therefore get to know the characters better.  One example is on page 51, where Huck Finn describes what Pap is doing.  There is no dialogue, but you really can almost hear Pap talking in the way Huck describes it.

For instance when he says, “He said he was down to town, and everything was going wrong…but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge Thatcher knew how to do it” and again when he says, “…he polished off with a kind of general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn’t know the names of, and so called them what’s-his-name, when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing” (51).