The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain is a story that follows a young realist boy and his journey through the southern pre-civil war region. Twain set this novel in a post-reconstruction society and details the beliefs, manners, and morals within it. Throughout the novel, Huck Finn faces regional conflict with the Southern civilizations, and as he travels deeper into the South, he fights a battle within himself to decide whether to listen to his mind, or his heart which has been tainted by southern society and its characteristics of aristocratic belief. Twain puts Huck Finn as the realist narrator who is in conflict with the regional setting to show us that we must challenge and test what we …show more content…
Here, Huck runs into a group looking for runaway slaves, and Huck is faced with one of the biggest challenges yet, the truth. Ultimately, Huck decides to refrain from telling them about Jim’s identity, to protect him. They went off and I aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong…Then I thought a minute and says to myself, hold on—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now (122). Slavery is far stricter in the deep South than it is in any other region. So, when Huck is met by a group of people designated for the capturing of runaway slaves, he is faced with regional conflict. For his entire life, Huck was taught to report runaway slaves, and that it is the lawful thing to do. However after meeting the runaway slave Jim, Huck faces inner conflict and is not sure that turning in a seemingly good person is the right thing to do. Huck Finn knows that that if he reported Jim to the authorities, and revealed his identity, he would feel like he did the wrong thing. Huck’s actions reflect what Twain wants us to learn, in that we must resist the general culture and to test what we know, to find what we think is right and ethical, and form our own understanding. Huck finds what is right and wrong in his society and challenges it to see if it is what he wants and forms his own understanding. So, after escaping a steamboat, Huck walks into another test when he meets the Grangerfords, a southern family, who uphold aristocratic