Huck puts on his store-bought clothes and goes
to see Silas Phelps, the man who is holding Jim. While on his search,
Huck encounters the duke putting up posters for The Royal Nonesuch.
When the duke questions him, Huck concocts a story about how he
wandered the town but found neither Jim nor the raft. The duke initially
slips and reveals where Jim really is (on the Phelps farm) but then
changes his story and says he sold Jim to a man forty miles away.
The duke encourages Huck to head out on the three-day, forty-mile
trip.
Read a translation of
Chapter 31 →
Analysis: Chapters 29–31
In the aftermath of the Wilks episode, the duke
and the dauphin lose the last vestiges of their inept, bumbling
charm and become purely menacing and dangerous figures. Although
the standoff over the Wilks estate ultimately is resolved without
any physical or financial harm to anyone, the depth of greed and
sliminess the con men display is astonishing. Then, just when it
appears the duke and the dauphin can sink no lower, the catastrophe
that Twain has foreshadowed for the last few chapters materializes
when Huck discovers that Jim is missing. Just as it has throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, evil follows Huck and Jim onto the raft and thwarts
their best attempts to escape it.
Jim’s capture significantly matures Huck, for
it convinces him to break with the con men for good and leads him
to a second moment of moral reckoning. Huck searches the social
and religious belief systems that white society has taught him for
a way out of his predicament about turning Jim in. In the end, Huck
is unable to pray because he cannot truly believe in these systems,
for he cares too much about Jim to deny Jim’s existence and humanity.
Huck’s thoughts of his friendship with Jim lead him to listen to
his own conscience, and, echoing his sentiments from Chapter 1,
Huck resolves to act justly by helping Jim and “go to hell” if necessary.
Once again, Huck turns received notions upside down, as he figures
that even hell would be better than the society in which he lives.
Huck then sets out on his first truly adult endeavor—setting off
to free Jim at whatever moral or physical cost to himself. It is
vital to note that Huck undertakes this action with the belief that
it might send him to hell. Though he does not articulate this truth
to himself, he trades his fate for Jim’s and thereby accepts the
life of a black man as equal to his own.
