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SUMMARY
Pap resorts to legal methods to force Judge Thatcher to give up Huck's money. He maintains his resentment of the fact that Huck is attending school. He thrashes him for going to school. Although for Huck, school-going is not a blissful exercise, nevertheless, out of sheer malevolence towards Pap, he continues it.
The trial at the court takes a long time and, in the meantime, Pap becomes restless. He hangs around Widow Douglas' house, as he wants to keep an eye on Huck. The lady threatens him with dire consequences if he doesn't stop peeking. After being threatened by the lady, he plots Huck's abduction. Taking him to the Illinois shore, he keeps him captive in an old log hut. He makes sure that Huck has no means of getting out. He hides the key under his head at night. He also hides all tools so that Huck has no chance of an escape. In the daytime, he locks him up in the log-cabin and goes down to town to trade fish. They live on fish and game for the next couple of months and Huck starts liking his carefree ways again. After all, this is the kind of life that he always had a yearning for. He loves to be in rags, smoking and lazing around the whole day. He, no longer has to bother about "Miss Watson pecking at you all the time."
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| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 6 |
Pap starts keeping Huck locked up, all alone, in the cabin for days on end. It is not until Pap becomes too merciless that Huck contemplates escape. After carefully inspecting the cabin, he finally finds a rusty wood - saw without a handle. He gets to work and saws a section of the log to make a hole big enough to escape.
When he is almost done, Pap returns, in a rotten mood. Disconcerted that the legal process hasn't picked momentum, he starts cursing everybody, including Widow Douglas. He then orders Huck to get the few things that he has brought from town. After dinner, Pap starts cursing the government for trying to take a man's son away from him and for giving voting rights to a nigger. In his inebriated state, he falls into the tub of salt pork and hurts himself badly.
Huck waits patiently for Pap to go to sleep so that he can resume his plan to escape. But Pap, in a delirium, starts hallucinating about snakes crawling up all over his body. Imagining Huck to be the Angel of Death, he tries to kill him. After an unsuccessful attempt, he gets exhausted and falls asleep. Huck, petrified by now, keeps a loaded gun with him so that he can use it against Pap, if the need arises.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Huck's decisiveness, that he wants to continue his education, more to spite his rather than for any other reason, helps us gauge the extent of his resentment towards the latter. Of course, we don't blame Huck for harbouring such malice towards his father. Far from setting examples that Huck, as a son, can emulate, Pap is uncouth and repulsive - physically as well as morally. "A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud."
Pap's brutal treatment of Huck makes the latter view society as equally evil and brutal. "But by-and-by Pap got too handy with his hick'ry and I couldn't stand it." After all, it is Pap who, for Huck, is the first representation of society. Huck's outlook towards society is based on his first impressions, gained from family, which are not very pleasant. Huck loathes his father's presence to the extent that he contemplates kiling him with the loaded rifle.
An abhorrent and a gross man, Pap hardly endows Huck with fatherly support that every son hankers after. For him, Huck is not, a son who needs to be loved. He wants to own Huck for the latter's money. "He said he would show who was Huck Finn's boss." It is indeed preposterous when Pap claims that he wouldn't let the government take his son away from him because he has spent years nurturing him, giving him all the love. "Here's the law a-standing ready to take a man's son away from him a man's own son; which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising." It is not love, but sheer money-matters, which buoys Pap to fight for Huck's custody: The father's merciless ways force Huck to seek a father-figure elsewhere. As we will see in the following chapters, despite their racial disparities, Huck fosters a closer bond with Jim than he does with his own biological father.
Pap's cursing the government epitomizes his own racist attitude. "And they call that govment." His intolerance towards the "free nigger" from Ohio stems from the fact that the latter he is not a white man. It is ironical that a useless, good-for-nothing wait, like Pap, should consider himself superior to a literate and educated man, merely on racial grounds.
"They said that he was a p'fessor in a college and could talk all kinds of languages and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out."
They said he could vote.. " It is ridiculous how Pap suffers damage to his self-esteem at the revelation that the black man had the right to vote. Pap's outburst, against the government, makes it evident that the former is the most racist amongst all other characters in the novel. At least, the others have a respectable social standing that justifies their snobbery. Pap is not even capable of feeding himself, but imagines himself to be superior as compared to the educated nigger from Ohio.