1 Write a literaty text analysis of the following excertpt from chapter 22 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Suggested topics: importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descrptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class (at least 2) or others.
"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. (...) Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they WOULD do.
(...)
"... The average man don’t like trouble and danger. YOU don’t like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a man – like Buck Harkness, there – shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are – COWARDS – and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE – and take your half-a-man with you” – tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this."
2. In chapter 28, Huck makes the following reflection about saying the truth or lying: " I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. " - Can you extrapolate from this reflection and think about other cases where the fiction you have read in this course problematized the pragmatic value of lying vs. telling the truth?