In my last post I talked about how Huck is a voice of reason and truth in Mark Twain’s novel. For a truthful character, however, he is pretty superstitious. Huck starts out in chapter 4 spilling the salt and not being able to throw some over his shoulder. He says in response, “The widow put in a good word for me, but that warn’t going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough” (Loc 898).

Huck is not necessarily the pure and simple truth that I described in my first post. He is still affected very much by suspicious traditions of that day. Huck plays up his own superstition with Jim, which also highlighted another element of the story, stereotypes. Huck asks Jim to do some magic for him. Jim says:

But you is all right. You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo’ life, en considable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you’s gwyne to git well agin. Dey’s two gals flyin’ ’bout you in yo’ life.

Jim is painted as being a sort of black magic character. It is clear that Huck goes to Jim for this sort of help because he’s an African American slave. This deep stereotyping is clear throughout the reading so far. I think that this deep stereotyping is to reflect the stereotypes build into the society of the day. Even Huck, who occasionally sees through those things, cannot escape all of the standards of his society. He is superstitious and follows stereotypical.

via Huck Finn (Ch3-Ch7).