Critical analysis on Huckleberry Finn :: essays research papers

     And as we struck into town and up through the affection of it--it was as much as half-after eight,       and so--here comes a ramp rush of people, with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and      banging tin pans and blowing horns and we jumped to one side to let them go by and as they went      by, I see they had the king and the inclose astraddle of a rail--that is I knowed it was the king and the      duke, thought was all everyplace sea dog and Feathers, and didnt look resembling nonhing in the existence that was      human--just looking like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it make me sick to      see it and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldnt never feel some(prenominal)      hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. H uman beings bathroom be      awful cruel to one another.          In the above flight from The Adventures of huckabackleberry 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 antecedent in their adventures. The king and duke have been captured and are being carried "astraddle of a rail" (369), which websters.com defines as being on or above and extending onto twain 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 distinctive punishment used to enforce justice, with roots dating back to as early as 1191 with Richard I of England. The goal of tarring and feathering was to hurt and sink a person enough so that they would leave town and not cause any more mischief. Hot tar was poured onto a sad while he was immobilized, then feathers were either thrown onto the criminal 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 stick to the tar for days making the persons sentence clear to the public. Tarring and feathering was eventually discard because it did nothing to rehabilitate the criminal.      Huck tells his readers that after the king and duke are tarred and plumed that they look ".