Fallacies

Chapter 1-16 Carolyn Lo Coco

"I’ve always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is one of the carelessness and foolishest things a body can do.” (p. 55)

In this quote, Huckleberry Finn is describing how looking over the left shoulder would be just insane. However, many people don’t really pay attention to which shoulder they would look over, and there is no speciality in the right shoulder.

Chapter 17-21 Kristen Allan

Chapter 22-28 Trinity Gomez

Courage, the Cowardly Man.

A fallacy made in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is “The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men, in the day-time, and robbed the lot.” (163) It falsely states that ALL average men, so most men, are cowards.  It is falsely stated that all the men in the North are cowards because they weak and humble and that all the men in the South are cowards because they go around robbing people. As a women, i have the bias of thinking that all men are cowards, but that is false. There are some pretty strong men, I mean look at the people who fight for our country. That does not seem like a coward to me. Also, Huck himself is not a coward, he never afraid to stand up for what he believes in, and constantly breaks societal norms.

Chapter 29-35 Margo Irie

“So the next day after the funeral, along about noon-time, the girls’ joy got the first jolt; a couple of nigger traders come along, and the king sold them the niggers reasonable, for three-day drafts as they called it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their mother down the river to Orleans”(204).

In this point in the novel, the king has decided to sell his slaves to the slave traders separating their families. Sending “the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their mother down the river to Orleans”(204) caused much commotion amongst the girls. The fallacy of this quote is apparent with the knowledge of slave trading at this time period. To sell the slaves separately from their families was a common practice, and Twain is incorrect to make this disconnection of the family so surprising. The “poor miserable girls”(204) in reality would have known that the king was going to sell the slaves to separate states. While this is a saddening ideal of taking apart a family due to slavery, this is a fallacy as the excitement that took place due to the separation would not have occurred so drastically.

Chapter 36-the last Natalie Fung

  “Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Chapter 43

       Tom Sawyer lead Huck Finn to believe that they needed to free Jim, when in reality he just wanted a little bit of excitement. Going into the Phelps house, Tom Sawyer already knew that Miss Watson had passed away along with the information that Jim was a freed man now because she stated that in her will. Then seeing that his Aunt Polly and Aunt Sally were communicating he intervened and wrote that Tom (Huck) and Sid (Tom) were there. Which then made Aunt Polly come down to reunite with her sister, clearing up the confusion. Then telling Huck that his father had died, which explained the man in the floating house, who was his father.