Huck Finn Close Reading

“Did you want to kill him, Buck?”
“Well, I bet I did.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Him? He never done nothing to me.”
“Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?”
“Why, nothing—only it’s on account of the feud.”
“What’s a feud?”
“Why, where was you raised? Don’t you know what a feud is?”
“Never heard of it before—tell me about it.”
“Well,” says Buck, “a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time.
“Has this one been going on long, Buck?”
“Well, I should reckon! It started thirty year ago, or som’ers along there. There was trouble ‘bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit—which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.”
“What was the trouble about, Buck?—land?”
“I reckon maybe—I don’t know.”” (Twain, 91-92)

In this quote, Huck is questioning why his friend, Buck, shot at a random stranger who just happened to ride by. Buck, a Grangerford, explains that the person was not a random stranger, but rather a member of a feuding family, the Shepherdsons. Huck continuously asks questions about the feud to try and make sense of it, though he never seems to completely understand the point of the fighting.

The feud that takes place between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons closely resembles an infamous feud that took place in the 1880s between the Hatfields and McCoys. Being the satirical writer that he is, Twain was likely commenting on what he believed to be the stupidity of these types of feuds. The way Buck “don’t know” why the feud started, especially after the casual “Well, I bet I did” in response to being asked if he wanted to kill someone after shooting at them, shows how ingrained the feud is in Buck’s head. He doesn’t register how many people get hurt, or even that he possibly gets hurt, so long as “everybody’s killed off,” as is supposed to happen in a feud. Here, Twain is essentially making fun of the feuds because most people, in a logical situation, would avoid something that they know would end in their death. He sees the feuds that he had witnessed as silly and pointless because all it meant was losing loved ones and taking the lives of another’s loved ones. He may have also seen this as important because he lost his father at a young age and thought that the loss of a life for such a pointless reason was a waste of a life.

With the feud, Twain also could have been commenting on people’s desires and how it can play a huge role in one’s life. There is a psychological theory that was created by Sigmund Freud, that explains how people have three parts of their subconscious. This includes the id, which is a person’s impulses and desires and just wants to fulfil them, the superego, which is the rational part, and the ego, which balances the id and the superego. With the Grangerfords, specifically Buck, represent the id. They desire to take out the Shepherdsons at all costs shows this, especially when others and their own are getting hurt because of it. Huck acts as a sort of superego when he tries to rationalize with Buck, explaining how the feud seems to be hurting others. Without a consistent or strong superego, or even ego, the id is able to do as it pleases, though it eventually gets hurt. This is proven later when the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons have one final battle that kills most of both families.