Huckleberry Finn Good Vs Evil

Mark Twain first published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 in the United Kingdom; it was published one year later in the United States. Taught in schools over 100 years later, Huckleberry Finn and his adventures have taught many lessons to youth around the world. Huck Finn is around 13 or 14 years old and runs off from his adoptive mother Widow Douglass because she wanted to “sivilise” him. After faking his death and running again, this time from his drunk and abusive father, Huck finds Miss Watsons’ runaway slave, Jim. Together, they travel down the Mississippi river in an attempt to get Jim to freedom. Through many problems and conflicts, one inner battle is prominent until the last few chapters when it is finally resolved. Huck
cannot decide if he should follow the “good” path, which is returning Jim to Miss Watson and asking forgiveness from God or follow the “evil” path: getting Jim to free ground.
In this classic good vs. evil novel, Twain uses several different anecdotes to further explain Huck’s inner battle. The forces of good and evil make appearances in actions and people themselves and prove one thing: society skews people’s ideas on good and evil. Huck realizes that when he accompanies Jim to freedom, despite society telling him the right thing to do it to turn Jim in. Society is often said to cloud the judgement of individuals’ morals. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proves this through the clouded and confused eyes of young, adventurous boy.
Throughout the novel, Huck’s view on justice and truth often come into conflict with what society believes to be truth and justice. The main dilemma for Huckleberry Finn is when he realizes he is helping a slave escape. Huck first begins to realize the predicament he is in when he and Jim think they are close to Cairo, which is where Jim can catch a boat upstream to Ohio and become free. Huck says to himself “Let up on me [his conscience]-it ain’t too late, yet- I’ll paddle ashore at the first light, and tell… All my
troubles was gone” (Twain 83). Yet when actually confronted by men if the other man on the raft was a runaway, Huck said “he’s white”. So, despite what society was telling him was evil, Huck believed it was good. Later in the chapter, Huckleberry Finn is debating with himself on if he would’ve felt better turning Jim in rather than lying to the men. After deciding he would feel bad either way, “I [Huck] reckoned I wouldn’t be bothered no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time” (Twain 85). However, it was not until Jim was recaptured that Huckleberry Finn realized he is going to have to do evil in the eyes of society to achieve good inside himself. After discovering that Jim had been taken again, Huck realized that he cannot hide things from God. He wrote a letter telling Miss Watson where her “runaway nigger” was and immediately he felt “clean of sin for the first time” (Twain 194). Huck then got to thinking of all his adventures with Jim and how “I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world” so he says “‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’-and tore it up”(Twain 195).This is the time where Huck, unconsciously, realized that what society perceives to be good and evil is not necessarily the rules you should follow. At fourteen years old, he realizes that slavery is not the good society thinks it is, but rather it is the evil. Twain also uses the surrounding actions of others to display the fight between what is moral and what is not.
The biggest act of the good versus evil Twain is trying to display is the feud between the Sheppardsons and the Grangerfords.
Buck tells Huckleberry Finn that the feud started around 30 years ago, yet no one really knows why. All that Buck knows is that to end the fight, the other family needs to be killed. All of them. This could translate over to what Huck believes about the good and evil within a person. Based on what he said after the letter, Huck believes that to be good, a person must be completely washed of sin and pure, which is impossible. He also said shortly after that if you are going to be evil, you might as well be completely evil. No use being a mix of the two, in Huck’s mind. Finally, after 263 pages, over the course of a plethora of adventures, Huckleberry Finn realized that a person cannot be truly good without disrupting the confines society puts on them. Perhaps this is what Twain wanted people to realize. Maybe this is the reason this book is still taught over 100 years later. Of course, the world will never truly know what Mark Twain meant because as he says “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (Twain
3).