Everyone lies. Some people try to justify this immoral action by claiming that they are using their lies for good, instead of evil. It is often hard to know at what point a lie becomes an irrevocable, cruel action as opposed to a convenient alternate explanation. Huck Finn, the main character and narrator in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, also wrestles with this dilemma. Growing up in the South in the midst of slavery, Huck feels forced to be dishonest about his identity many times in order to protect Jim, a runaway slave Huck has grown close to (appositive). Although Huck deceives almost everyone in the novel, his lies had different results depending on the senario. Twain uses Huck’s interactions with a woman in St Petersburg, Aunt Sally, and Jim throughout in order to suggest that when lying is necessary, it does not always have negative consequences, whereas pointless lies often bring awful repercussions. To begin with, when Huck attempts to deceive a woman in St. Petersburg, albeit unsuccessfully, he gets the …show more content…
The letters are completely useless for the task at hand, yet Huck gets peer pressured into helping distribute them when Tom says, “’if we don’t give them notice there won’t be nobody nor nothing to interfere with us,” (267). Tom openly admits that writing these letters with the sole purpose of adding suspicion to Jim’s escape sets up more trouble for Huck and Jim. These letters lead Aunt Sally to invite over armed men who end up shooting Tom, seriously worrying Huck and indirectly getting Jim recaptured, as he flees the premises. Clearly Huck does not need to participate in this trickery, so it is consistent with Twain’s tone towards lying that Tom gets shot as a result of the letter