Lying In Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

The progression of morality from the stark divide between right and wrong over the past twenty five hundred years into the highly variegated moral spectrum that is used today is the result of the division of ethics into seven moral prisms. The complexity of this moral spectrum deals with issues of duty, compassion, community, happiness, virtue, and self. This brings to light the moral permissibility of lying, when lying becomes the most intuitively moral option. Mark Twain, throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, blurs the lines between right and wrong; actively utilizing the moral spectrum that was not widely recognized until close to fifty years later. During Huck Finn’s adventures, he constantly runs into moral conflict; many of

Twain defends the positive aspects of lying and trickery through the means which Huck escapes from the cabin that he is trapped in with his father. Due to his father’s abusive nature, Huck feels the need to escape from his custody before his Pap returns from the town up river. He cuts a hole out of the cabin, leaves a trail of pig blood, makes it look like a robbery gone wrong, and leaves scents to divert the search dogs. Huck ends the endeavor by saying that “they won’t sift the river for anything but my dead carcass”(34). While this type of lying seems immoral without context, the abusive nature of Huck’s father makes the reader support and root for Huck to succeed. The most outstanding example of Huck lying to protect Jim comes once the Duke and King are introduced, and in order to protect Jim, Huck weaves the tale of how his father, brother, and Jim were “... going down to Orleans on [the raft]” but “Pa’s luck didn’t hold out…” which saved Jim from being sold by these two con men (125-126). This begins to challenge the traditional view of morality, and makes the reader proud of Huck’s actions. Twain uses Huckleberry Finn in these scenes to challenge the societal belief that lying is bad without exception, and builds a stark contrast between moral and immoral lying. By constructing this scene soon

The value of morality in the traditional sense is challenged directly by including lies and tall tales in contrast with the current situation of the characters. The immorality of lying is still defined, but the blatant division between right and wrong is challenged and rewritten by Twain. The use of the Duke and King, along with Miss Watson and the widow, was to create the lower end of the spectrum that closely related to traditional views. This brought about the first instances that Twain was building a spectrum of morality. Huck, who represents the escape from tradition and what is considered in society to be decency, is used to create the middle of the spectrum. Huck’s lies vary from nearly immoral to decent and kind natured throughout the story, which constructs a large portion of the spectrum that Twain has so brilliantly defined. Jim, while also being used to combat the traditional belief of the time that black people are slaves rather than human beings, is also used to create the top end of the moral spectrum. Twain’s use of the moral spectrum blurred the line between right and wrong for people of the post-war era of the 1800’s, and changed the minds of many about the morality of lying. The use of this spectrum, along with the building blocks of modern morality, rewrote the way the world thinks about ethical