Huckleberry Finn Alcohol Quotes

Under the Influence
In Mark Twain`s novel, Huckleberry Fin, he explores intoxication through his characters and how alcohol affects them, their lives, and sense of judgment. He illustrates how alcohol affects the way a person acts through the characters of Pap, the King and the Duke, and Boggs. In the novel, Huck`s father Pap is a racist, ignorant, and abusive alcoholic. Pap was gone for most of Huck life, but returns when he hears Huck has $6,000. Pap appears in Huck`s bedroom drunk and demands Huck to hand over the money. Unfortunately for Pap, Huck had signed the money over to Judge Thatcher. Pap is furious and threatens to beat Huck, and in an attempt to not be beaten, Huck hands Pap his $3 which his father later uses on whiskey in

There, Pap abuses Huck in a drunken rage as he whips him and gets “to handy with his hick`ry” (Twain 24). He also locks Huck inside when he goes out to the town to purchase more whiskey even though “he had enough whisky there for two dunks and one delirium tremens” (Twain 28). Pap had also locked Huck inside for 3 days where Huck “judged he had got drowned and [he] wasn`t ever going to get out.” (Twain 24). One night, Pap was so drunk he began hallucinating. He was “looking wild and skipping around every which way and yelling about snakes” (Twain 29) and fell over screaming the devil had him. He then grabbed a knife and almost killed Huck thinking he was the Angel of Death. The morning after Pap does not remember anything that had happened the previous night. Twain shows through Pap that alcohol can make a person do horrible acts when they are

Throughout the book, Huck and Jim travel along with the King and the Duke and witness their scams. Their most conniving scam was when they heard that Peter Wilks, a wealthy man, has passed away. The King and Duke hear that Peter Wilks’ other two brothers have not yet arrived, so they decide they will impersonate the brothers, William and Harvey, in order to inherit the family estate. Huck hated their scam because he felt bad for the family`s three daughters, Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanna. Their scam soon fails as the real William and Harvey Wilks show up and the King and the Duke are run out of town. They run back to the raft where they find Huck and Jim. When Huck sees the King and the Duke he “wilted right down onto the planks and [gave] up” because “it was all [he] could do to keep from crying.” (Twain 206). When they reach the raft, the King and Duke get into a heated argument over whose fault it was, and how they were going to back stab each other by taking the money and not splitting it with the other person. They soon become drunk as the King “took to his bottle for comfort; and before long the Duke tackled his bottle” and in an hour “they became thick as thieves again” (Twain 210) cuddling with each other and later had forget about their quarrel. Because the King and the Duke became drunk, the alcohol slowly affected their emotions, causing them to become more