Huckleberry Finn's Journey to Morality Through Societal Emancipation

Mark Twain once described his novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as “a struggle between a sound mind and a deformed conscience”. Throughout the novel, Huck wrestles with the disparity between his own developing morality and the twisted conscience of his society. In doing so, he becomes further distanced from society, both physically and mentally, eventually abandoning it in order to journey to the western frontier. By presenting the disgust of Huck, an outsider, at the state of society, Mark Twain is effectively able to critique the intolerance and hypocrisy of the Southern South. In doing so, Twain asserts that in order to exist as a truly moral being, one must escape from the chains of a diseased society.

As Huck journeys down the Mississippi river, Twain presents the hypocrisy and immorality of antebellum Southern society. Traveling from his abusive home, Huck encounters criminals, shipwrecks, and even murder before becoming stranded with the Grangerford family. The Grangerfords engage in a bloody feud with the rival Shepherdson family, both sides killing each other for no reason except the continuation of the feud (Twain 127). Although Huck encounters many groups throughout his journey, perhaps none so encapsulates Twain’s critique of society as the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Despite the fact that neither family really understands the origins of the feud, they continue to fight, hypocritically ignoring sermons of “brotherly love” heard in a church packed with a veritable armory of ammunition (Twain 129). Twain’s most scathing critique is evident in his cruel depiction of the feud’s body count; Huck experiences the death of Buck, a boy about his age, and the reader hears of the deaths of other Grangerfords, man...

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...ak free from societal mores and empathetically understand others as they truly are, particularly the runaway slave Jim, with whom he travels. Huck’s eventual understanding that he can never exist in this diseased society causes him to “light out” for the western frontier. Although Huck’s world may seem alien to modern readers, the “sivilized” society of today still grapples with injustice, intolerance, and hypocrisy. It is one’s responsibility as an ethical citizen to examine the mores of the society in which they live and to break with those mores should they conflict with one’s moral understanding. Whether the year is 1820 or 2014, one must do one’s utmost to treat others with the respect that they deserve, and thus must follow Huck’s example of breaking from a diseased society by any means possible, even if there are no available frontiers towards which to flee.