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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
use the word 'beautiful' six times previously in description of the Grangerfords has evaporated. He attends church with the family and notices all the Grangerfords keep their guns close by. Huck thinks it "was pretty ornery preaching", but the feuding patriarchy praises the good values listed by the Preacher. The hypocritical mixture of guns and sermons, holy talk and bloodthirstiness make it "one of the roughest Sundays [Huck] had run across yet". He now questions the motives of everyone in the household, including Miss Sophia as she send him to the church on an errand. By this point the cynical, sarcastic Twain and the disillusioned Huck are of one mind. Huck walks among a group of hogs who have sought the coolness of the church and notes "most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different"
The narration of Huck's final day with the Grangerfords is prefaced by: "I don't want to talk much about the next day". For Huck's easy-going fluid dialogue to become stilted and censored, the reader knows the young boy has been hurt. A senseless fatal feud is not the only tragedy depicted through the events of that day, also shown is the heartbreak of a young boy who loses every vestige of the hopeful trust he put in a father, brothers and sisters. Huck is shocked to hear the fatherless, brotherless Buck complain he hadn't managed to kill his sister's lover on an earlier occaison. And then from his perch in the tree, Huck hears Buck's murderers "singing out, 'Kill them, kill them!' It made Huck so sick he most fell out of the tree". He wishes he "hadn't come ashore that night, to see such things".
The end of chapter nineteen, when Huck returns to the raft and Jim, almost exactly mirrors the end of chapter eighteen. Both chapter conclude with Huck enjoying a good meal with good company in a cool, comfortable place. First it is with the Grangerfords in the cool, high-ceilinged area in the middle of their double house. "Nothing could be better", Huck thought. But only a few pages later the raft and Jim provide the same comforts. Nothing had ever sounded so good to him as Jim's voice, and Huck felt "mighty free and easy and comfortable on the raft". . Huck happily slides away from the bloody scene with the unorthodox father figure of a runaway slave. Huck has realized he does not need a traditional family to make him feel safe and happy. He must develop and live by his own integrity, not the past decisions of a father or grandfather. This is clearly Mark Twain's opinion also, and the reader, full of relief at Huck's escape, is aware that the author sent us all into the Grangerfords' world to prove just that point.