Readers may argue with equal plausibility, however, that Huck chooses the name strategically, hoping to get a laugh-which he does (273). Beidler, long ago suggested that Huck here is “unconsciously identifying with the dead child,” part of a pattern throughout the novel that shows an attraction to death “as a release from the cruelty and suffering that is life-at least ‘sivilized’ life” (248).

The best interpreter of the passage, Peter G.

He begins crying, though it is questionable whether Huck’s tears are involuntary or a ploy for sympathy, and when made to identify himself he chooses the name of the murdered child in a ghost story that he has just overheard. 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. '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.

The adventures of huckleberry finn text