Critical analysis on Huckleberry Finn :: essays research papers

     And as we struck into townsfolkship and up by the middle of it--it was as much as half-after eight,      then--here comes a raging rush of people, with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and      banging tin pans and blowing horns and we jumped to one placement to let them go by and as they went      by, I see they had the exponent and the dike astraddle of a rail--that is I knowed it was the tycoon and the      duke, thought was on the whole over tar and Feathers, and didnt look like nothing in the world that was      human--just looking like a couple of monstrous uncollectible soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to      see it and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldnt never feel any       huskiness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. wo rld beings can be      awful cruel to one another.          In the higher up passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Tom and Huck walk through the middle of a town and see two con artists (the king and duke) who they had encountered earlier in their adventures. The king and duke have been captured and ar being carried "astraddle of a rail" (369), which websters.com defines as being on or in a higher place and extending onto both sides, covered with tar and feathers through the town. The above passage displays why Huck disagrees with the public mistreatment and humiliation of others.     According to the online encyclopedic website, www.wikipedia.org, tarring and feathering was a typical punishment used to enforce justice, with roots dating brook to as early as 1191 with Richard I of England. The goal of tarring and feathering was to harm and humiliate a person enough so that they would leave town and not cause any more mischief. Hot tar was poured onto a reprehensible while he was immobilized, then feathers were either thrown onto the savage from buckets or the criminal was thrown into a pile of feathers and rolled around. The criminal was then taken to the edge of town and released in the hopes of him never returning. The feathers would shell to the tar for days making the persons sentence clear to the public. Tarring and feathering was eventually abandoned because it did nothing to rehabilitate the criminal.      Huck tells his readers that after the king and duke are tarred and feathered that they look ".