Chapter 18
I was to blame somehow. (153)

This statement, narrated by Huck, comes as the deadly episode of the Sheperdson and Grangerford’s familial war ends with the murder of many members from both parties, including Colonel Grangerford and Buck Grangerford, Huck’s equivalent character. This passage not only suggests the pattern of Huck’s childlike ignorance yet mature reasoning, but also underscores an accidental, unknowing observer’s guilt in an acceptedly violent situation. Huck literally implies his guilty feelings in but this one line, leaving the rest of the paragraph to be mostly understatements of what should be a shell-shocked child (after just watching two boys die at the hands of grown men). Says Huck, “I was mighty down-hearted.” As the reader is not offered access into the trauma that should now reside in Huck, Twain allows this one statement to be Huck’s admittance to holding a major role in this battle. However, Huck plays no major role in the conflict itself, and it is because of this that just as he entered their scene, he leaves. On a larger level, however Twain indicates this breed of situation, not new to protagonists, as a something that has manifested itself to hold greater power than it should. A conflict that no one of the current generation can now remember, battling till death for no reason other than being told can be considered Twain’s satirization of blindly accepting beliefs, such as that of religion and politics, and proceeding to fight to the death for them. Huck is not actually to blame in this story, but with the assumed “Friar” position, that of the messenger and “good”-intender, Huck becomes “to blame.”