Could it be more Complicated?

     In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, as the book is coming to an end, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are trying to free Huck's friend and escaped slave, Jim. There are fairly easy, danger-free ways of doing this, all of which Huck points out to Tom; however, Tom refuses to do it the easy ways. He is determined that they must set Jim free the "right" way, in other words, the way that prisoners escape in the books he reads. By the end of this ordeal, Jim had snakes, rats, and spiders piled into the cabin he was locked in, a rope ladder made out of a sheet, a "journal" written on a stolen shirt, and he had made multiple engravings into a grindstone they smuggled into the cabin through a hole they dug.
     It fascinates me just how many unnecessary things the two boys did to free Jim. All they had to do was dig a hole from the outside into the space where Jim was being held to free him. Instead, Huck just took Tom's word that they "had" to do all of these extra things. The boys made freeing Jim much, much more complicated than it needed to be. It struck me just how easily Huck and Jim were convinced to do all of these things, too. Jim I suppose I can understand since he was a slave and had never been allowed to have his own opinions before; however, Huckleberry Finn had done many things without Tom before and did have his own opinions yet he allowed Tom Sawyer to walk all over him. Tom made freeing Jim extremely complicated but the most important thing is that, in the end, Jim was freed.