Internal struggles and morality are popular topics and methods for continuing plot in literature. However, they are very rarely combined with satire. Mark Twain, in his American Realistic novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, utilizes Huck’s morality and crisis of conscience in order to satirize social institutions.
Twain uses Huck’s morality to satirize reformers. In one episode of the novel, Huck and Jim come across a shipwreck of the Walter Scott. Huck searches for any food, goods, or money and comes across a band of murderers. He abandons them on the wreck, but convinces the ferry watchman to save them (Twain 82). Eric Carl Link, in his criticism, “Huck the Thief,” on Questia, acknowledges this episode. He mentions how Huck’s abandonment
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He thinks, “Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I waren’t so much to blame, but something inside of me kept saying, ‘There was the Sunday School, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire’” (Twain 222). Michael J. Hoffman notes that Huck realizes that if he went to church, he would have had the social code ingrained in him. As a result, he would not have had to make hard moral choices (turning in Jim). By this, Twain satirizes religion as supporting an already corrupt morality (35). Huck’s full rejection of religion never occurs, allowing the reader to see the satire for themselves instead of having it forced upon them by the narrator. Huck’s belief that the codes of religion are “right” and the reader’s knowledge that they are “wrong” reveals Twain’s satirization. Organized religion is then seen as corrupt from the eyes of the reader, and not the narrator, which reveals Twain’s criticism of the corruption among the church. Through Huck’s moral conflicts, Twain satirizes organized religion in order to criticize the corruption and exclusiveness of the