The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, follows a young southerner child, Huck, and his adventures with a black slave, Jim. They are both fighting for their freedom, Huck from his father and Jim from his owner, Miss Watson. Jim has a very skeptical image in the book, sometimes sly and intelligent, yet sometimes uneducated and ignorant. This changing portrait of Jim is called the Angel/Beast dichotomy, which is a theory of Jim being portrayed as a two-faced character. Twain purposely diverts the reader's attention from choosing which one (beast or angel) Jim is without being completely sure. After reading the critical essay written by Bernard W. Bell, my opinion shifted from being undecided to believing that Twain portrayed Jim as a blackface comedian and not as a true character when Bell wrote "Twain writes: "To my mind it was a thoroughly delightful thing-" (Bell 128).
Jim's hairball oracle, which can "tell the future," is a sign of his superstitious personality. Twain shows in that chapter that Jim isn't very good at telling fortunes for people, by saying "Yo" ole father doan" you's gwyne to git hung" (Twain 18). In that paragraph, Jim says things like "you are going to have good luck, and you are going to have bad luck" and "your father will go away sometimes, and sometimes he will stay." This shows that he really doesn't know what he is talking about or that the hairball doesn't really tell fortunes and he thinks it does. Nevertheless, superstitions are a sign of stupidity on Jim's part and Twain is trying to patronize him by writing about the hairball oracle. The sideshow character image of Jim is played out throughout the entire novel, in other places besides the hairball.
Jim's ignorance really shows in a few key points in the novel, which makes him look uneducated. The first time he shows his ignorance was when he questions the story Huck tells him about kings.
