14: Satire

   Huck wakes up on his first morning as a free young man on the shore. He hears the cannons looking for him and continues to hide, but realizes how hungry he is. He remembers that the townsfolk always send loaves of bread with quicksilver in them to find corpses, so he decides to wait and watch for the bread intended to discover his non-existent corpse. The bread appears, and he enjoys it and thinks. He narrates "And then something struck me. I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it." (Twain, pg. 45) He believes that the bread has come to him because someone has asked through prayer that he receive this nourishment. This is a satirical dig by Twain at people who believe religion is simply that one always gets what one wants by asking for it by praying and believing. It is an uneducated and unrealistic view of religion and life.