Does anyone know why pretending would be an important theme in the Novel Huckleberry Finn?
The Duke and the Dauphin Further down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two grifters, both of whom join the two fugitives on the raft. The younger of the two, a man of about thirty, introduces himself as a son of an English Duke and is thereafter known as “the Duke.” The older con man, about seventy, then trumps the Duke’s claim by alleging that he is actually the “Lost Dauphin”, the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The Duke and the Dauphin then force Jim and Huck to allow them to travel on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on their way south. During the course of these schemes, Huck sees the attempted lynching of a southern gentleman, Colonel Sherburn, after Sherburn kills a harmless town drunk. Sherburn faces down the lynch mob with a loaded rifle and forces them to back down after an extended speech regarding what he believes to be the essential cowardice of “Southern justice” — i.e., the lynch mob. (This vignette, which stands out as essentially disconne
