Michael O, I used "deconstructed" as a verb. Your insistence on the noun "deconstruction" displays your distaste for that noun, but dodges the issue suggested in my use of the verb. Your conclusion that Huck succeeds in 'probably ' getting himself hung seems wistfully, unhelpfully romantic to me, and the unnerving notion that the individual succeeds as such in the course of being extinguished as such sets up yet another self-deconstructing discourse. sincerely, michael mcdonald