What Is Huckleberry Finn's Morality

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores the morality of Huckleberry Finn, an adventurous, young boy growing up in Missouri during the time of slavery, who rafts down the Mississippi River. Specifically, while still with the Widow Douglas, Huck is taught about spiritual gifts from God that allow a person to put others before himself and aid them whenever necessary; however, Huck sees “no advantage about it—except for the other people,” and denies the idea of helping others (11). This is highly ironic because continuously throughout the novel, Huck demonstrates that he helps people and is hence inherently good: he hides the late Peter Wilks’ money from con artists, tries to rescue the robbers on the Walter Scott steamboat, and

Specifically, Huck cannot understand that he is a good person because he lacks a civil upbringing. When Tom, a boy with a religious and typical childhood, decides that he will help Huck steal Jim out of slavery, Huck cannot understand how Tom, who has had a civil upbringing, chooses to act immorally by helping save Jim. Huck’s confusion lies in the idea that goodness is determined by a person’s upbringing and that because Tom has had a conventional upbringing, Tom must be a pure person. Through this reasoning, Huck is blinded to his own morality because his childhood is empty of convention and religion. Huck even discusses that had he gone to Sunday school he would have “learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting…goes to everlasting fire,” furthermore supporting that Huck believes himself to be immoral because he never received conventional, spiritual teaching (215). Additionally, when Huck decides to steal Jim out of slavery, he discusses that he will “take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it,” further proving that he believes he truly is a degenerate because of the way he was raised (215). Huck’s belief that he is a degenerate is proven even more so when Huck compares himself to Judas Iscariot, one of the most well-known sinners for having betrayed Jesus Christ himself, when Mary Jane promises to pray for Huck after he reveals that the duke and the dauphin are frauds. Thus, Huck truly does not recognize his