Thesis: The admirers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn call the book the oldest masterpiece of American literature that reveals the solid contradictions and the lack of justice in the life of American society before the Civil War. While set against slavery and racial injustice, the novel chronicles the moral education of its young protagonist, Huckleberry Finn. His encounter with Jim, who is a fugitive slave, allows him to see the injustice of his surroundings, and he rejects the known racist norms in society. This paper will deal with the ethical improvement of Huck, which exposes the wicked social circle and vice versa as a fundamental societal problem, forming a philosophical dilemmatic of individual rise and society’s stagnancy/regression.
Huck begins the novel as a societal product, having internalized the deeply ingrained racial prejudices that demonized Black people as inferior beings. Though he was raised in a slave-owning family, he often faces some moral dilemmas while on the run. However, he sets aside the morality of society and pursues an ethical course of action. Writing in his book, literary critic Shelley Fisher Fishkin puts forward that “Huck realizes at the moment of the turning point of the story that he has to decide between the two roads: ‘mentally [leaving] the nation by following the teachings of community’ or on the other hand to do the exact opposite and obey his own heart and his ‘humanity of humbleness,'” (Fishkin 6When Huck considers abandoning Jim, he declares “I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell'” (Twain 271). To Huck’s primary worldview, the heinous law commanded by society, which schools him not to assist the human kindred of a slave by any means, is a serious crime to the utmost degree. This final moment is considered as important as any character transformation for Huck, who becomes an independent ethical beliefs rejecter from unethical traditions.
On the contrary, Huck’s better understanding of right and wrong manifests as he develops his ability to empathize with Jim. The evil in the world is then shown in stark terms. The duke and the king that Huck and Jim encounter personify the height of villainy – shamelessly defrauding and manipulating others for personal gain, deploring violence against a drunken man, and attempting to separate Jim from his family by turning him over for a reward. Harold Beaver states, ” ‘ The action of the two comical cheats reflects the corruption, fraud, brutality, and inhuman behavior of a society with a civilized image and Christian moral values. However, because of the hypocrisy, racism, and lack of moral sensibility, only the surface shows the decent nature of such a society ‘ (Beaver 104). The honorable Huck is appalled by such injustice, between the morality of noble, flawed human beings reducing to a nihilistic mediocrity.
Even well-meaning citizens like the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons are ensnared by the toxic cycle of violence and retaliatory killing that consumes their families’ multigenerational feud. Twain skillfully utilizes a contrast to display the gap between the chivalric ideal – “…women so lovely and fair…like the heterogeneous ismay meadows flower” (121) – they declare and the ugly basis of their blood-borne duel – “heart like a shell jar vase” (122). The patriarchs are trapped in the past, and as they cannot see the truth, they pass on their corrupt and hateful knowledge to the youth. When the children are ‘regarded’ by the elderly, they are filled with the same hatred and thirst for battle that the parents have been. Their senseless conflict aptly symbolizes how societal sickness has been perpetuated despite the South’s pretense of upholding Christian morals and civility.
Indeed, Huck’s moral development emerges from his mutual racial friendship with Jim, transcending the deep-rooted Southern taboos and sparking an emotional bond across racial boundaries that finally shakes Huck’s mindset. Andrew Ngwudike explains that the raft symbolizes a liberating space “where Huck and Jim can establish a bond unrestrained by racial prejudices and injustices of society” (Ngwudike 34). Then, by maintaining their altruistic contact on a boat, Huck and Jim indicate “the ability to create a new value system which oversteps the present society’s restraining and negative elements” (35). In this sense, Huck becomes the champion of moral purification through his appreciation of humankind over an oppressive ethos based on hatred and greed, the natural causes of southern society’s triumph over their morality.
In the closing chapters, Twain accentuates the paradox by undercutting Huck’s stirring moral victory. Interestingly, the very freedom that Jim thought he had been denied by being sold into slavery was shown to be an illusion upon confirmation that Miss Watson had passed away, as this compromised his ability to be free. Twain “makes us all take a close look at the sincerity of Huck’s achievement of conqueror over self, and whether it is as noble as it may seem, given that the society’s racism and injustice are allowed to continue,” David Hill comments (Hill 28)The malignant social forces Huck temporarily transcends are left fully intact, perpetuating the cycle Twain so fiercely satirized. This destabilizing ending drives home the damning contradiction at the heart of the novel: the tragic ending is foreshadowed throughout the story by the realization of one young person who grows morally determined over the backdrop of an unchanging injustice. Huck’s road to enlightenment presented an imperfect route of redemption, given the unbreakable influence of slave-owning establishments and years of slavery.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had two main problems. Firstly, Huck is put to moments of moral dilemmas resulting from 19th-century ethics versus 21st-century ethics concerning slavery. Secondly, Huck’s moral development is stunted by the impact of living with a boozing drunkard and being influenced by society. Huck’s spiritual odyssey makes possible an uplifting reappraisal of the ideas ingrained in us that unjust prejudice is grounded on arbitrary boundaries and, most importantly, humanist values. However, by contextualizing this transformative growth within the morally decrepit antebellum South, Twain underscores how personal progress is no guarantee of wholesale cultural or institutional reform. The standard way in which Huck undergoes growth amid forced social upbringing is the depiction of the highest possible moral clarity that free thought can muster and the most profound degradation of humanity that can be arrived at when ethical principles are abandoned. Power is used according to the greed and hatred of the one who possesses it. On the one hand, the tripartite complexity of the drama was the personal victory of an individual when the system failed; on the other, it was the most significant moral falling that was hitting the society of the time in Twain’s era while exploring the questions that remain central even today.
Works Cited
Beaver, Harold. “The Novels of Mark Twain.” The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, edited by A. Robert Lee, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 101–121.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Hill, David. “The Paradox of Huckleberry Finn.” Readings on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Katie de Koster, Greenhaven Press, 1998, pp. 24–30.
Ngwudike, Andrew. “Negotiating Moral Dilemmas in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Hermeneutic Approach.” Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, pp. 30–44.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
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