Paper 1: Close Reading

The creators of The Adventures of Huck Finn, The Night of the Hunter, and Moonrise Kingdom are all interested in the story of authority in their given time periods. They use other stories (Moses, Noah, Shakespeare plays, Susie's fantasy books) as allegories to explain their individual film's story/ viewpoint on what authority has done to their characters. We see stories within stories to explain what people should do to handle the corrupt authority that has infested their daily lives. Were the 1930's corrupt? Can making up stories about the past and future teach the same lesson? In all three works the main point is that God is the only that knows everything; no other authority can be 100 percent right. Huck, Sam and Susie, and Jon are all caught in the midst of figuring this out. The point of stories is to remind us of the morals that society's authority has been trying to erase by transplanting characters into different times and retelling different stories through their eyes. 

       

Some examples: 

MK: kids are the "chosen ones" that have the knowledge of NOT knowing all of the rules that authority has laid out for them (authority shifts at end to where kids now realize what rules are good and which ones are bad--police, parents; family is not the only authority/ they can be wrong too; they fully understand the sacrament of marriage, whereas the adult questions their full understanding, Susie steals library books because the authority told her she cannot read too many at once; Anderson makes us look at Moses as a man that was separated from his society's rules that has corrupted the earth to follow God's authority, Adam&Eve in paradise listening to the serpent's wrong authority

HUCK: He makes up stories! Huck's name is constantly changing, he makes up who he is, who his family is (Jim is his sick Dad, Grangerfords &Shepardsons); Huck runs away from blood relatives to pick another family (family of one shared thought), he makes up his own characters because he wants a different story from the one Civil War-thinking society tells him (like King and Duke do too); Twain makes us look at Moses as an example of someone that rebelled against society's authority to follow God's (led Israelites out of Egypt). Jim 

NOTH: Powell symbolizes how corrupt authority can push people to do bad things (Ben Harper to steal and kill, Powell to kill, male jobs like hangmen); Jon and Pearl run away from the corrupt authority of a fake preacher to a woman that doesn't put her faith in society's authority but in God's; We look at Jesus's birth when three kings escape authority to see the Messiah, and Moses who is sent out of future bondage by his mother, Miss Cooper tells us in the first scene to "beware of false prophets in sheep's clothing"

other ideas:

-you can understand your life by looking at other people's stories/ can find strength by seeing how others handle similar situations in stories

-twisting stories into different interpretations is how a society's authority can corrupt the true morals  (Jim view on Moses vs. Huck's)

-reading fantasy books (The Girl from Jupiter; Disappearance of the 6th Grade) has more benefits than reading non-fiction books (Coping with the Very Troubled Child)