Judge Thatcher Quotes In Huckleberry Finn

“The character of Judge Thatcher in general is used as a vehicle for exposing the faults of the townspeople, as there is a lengthy passage describing several parties building a desirable façade for themselves in order to “show off” to the town celebrity who is apparently “showing off too” (Twain, 18).
Everyone is attempting to make an impression in order to stand out, which puts them all on the same level in spite of their concentrated effort to avoid that exact conclusion. Twain uses this to solidify to the readers that even though these people have an authority over Tom, it does not necessarily mean they have a greater level of understanding than him. This is made explicitly clear when Tom takes a corporal punishment in the place of another student (and the judge’s daughter); to the readers this is unquestionably a heroic act, while to the authority figure, Tom has been merely a troublemaker getting his just deserts. It is because of incidents like this that the nature of Tom’s

We see this in the previously mentioned incident where Tom takes a punishment for Becky. In that example, only the reader and Becky know about Tom’s heroism, and that’s all that matters. Likewise with the character of Huckleberry Finn, who protects Widow Douglas and becomes an unspecified hero, is seen as something of an outsider among the villagers. As the son of the town drunk, Huck Finn is seen as more of an annoyance than Tom. Tom and Huck both overcome their fears of Injun Joe and the public’s awareness of them to accomplish heroic achievements, and in doing so; they are successfully able to rebuke them both. Injun Joe is shown as someone who is a slave to his Sid, his low level human instincts. He was portrayed as always greedy, short-tempered, and monstrously vengeful. There was a streak of not very important or serious that follows his character throughout the story, with him actually utters the