Stories and storytelling in all three films are sort of instruction manuals for characters and for us readers. As an allegory, Huck Finn's story is reflected in Night of the Hunter and Moonrise Kingdom. But those two film are allegories in and of themselves as well, which says something about what stories really are; they are meant to be shared and applied to people's lives. Susie is the only character that actually reads in MK, gaining solace from fantasy books and passing those stories in a sort of Wendy- Peter Pan way on to Sam and the group of khaki scouts. And yet, the only thing that troubles her in the film is another book, the one entitled "Coping with a very troubled child". But this book is not actually meant for her, but for her parents. Her parents are the ones that need help coping, not Susie, which just proves the theme of the movie. This leads to another point about stories: the audience and storyteller's relationship. Stories are a way of providing examples of what to do and not do. And what book does this best? The Bible. Whether listeners believe that the events actually occurred in history or not, the morals are still there. Finding applications in everyday life through characters like Solomon, Moses and Noah as Huck and Jim did shows that different interpretations can have different effects on different people, which can also morph them into new applications.
Ok, lots here but I see a common theme in the idea of "applying books to our lives for instruction on how to live…." In other words, each work has a very allegorical spirit---both at the level of the story itself (Huck is like Moses, but also the characters read things allegorically….. can the same things be said with difference across the text---MK as a kind of allegory but also with "reading characters---"? Hunter?
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