Huck feels so mean and miserable that he wishes he were dead. Huck has no control over his conscience, conditioned by society. Instead, at least for now, he can only do what conscience compels him to do. In relation to conscience, then, Huck is not free, though he will grow into such a freedom. Active Themes. Society and Hypocrisy.
Related Quotes with Explanations. He resolves to turn Jim in. The slave-owner may never have harmed Huck, but he has harmed his slaves simply by owning them. Slavery and Racism. Jim spots in the distance what he thinks is Cairo.
Huck volunteers to paddle over and see if it is, with the intent of turning Jim in. As he does, a skiff comes along, aboard which are two armed men. At last, Huck lies: he says the man aboard his raft is white.
As the men paddle to investigate, Huck lets on that the illness that afflicts his family is both contagious and dangerous: smallpox. As soon as Huck does so, the men refuse to get anywhere near the raft, apologize to Huck, give him money, and paddle away. Up until this point, the novel has wavered back and forth between the river and the shore, with humorous and cruel events constantly bombarding the reader.
The conflicts of individual versus society, freedom versus civilization, and sentimentalism versus realism, as well as Huck's struggle between right and wrong, are all revealed in Huck and Jim's journey. And all come to a head in Huck's eventual decision. In the midst of these events rests Huck's inner struggle to ignore his conscience and transcend his environment. The catalyst for Huck's action is the sale of Jim back into slavery. Ironically, Huck believes he will be shunned by his community and doom himself to literal hell if he aids Jim.
Despite this realization, Huck's proclamation "All right, then, I'll go to hell," ends his struggle in a concise and powerful moment, which is the climax of the novel. Here, Huck wrestles with the fact that even good-intentioned acts can have tragic consequences. This quote, which appears in Chapter 31, shows Huck in the midst of making his biggest moral decision in the novel—that is, his decision about whether or not to continue to help Jim escape from captivity.
This passage also comes from Chapter 31, and it is also related to the passage quoted directly above. Here, Huck reframes his moral dilemma in the religious terms that he first learned from the Widow Douglas.
At the end of Chapter 33, after reuniting with Tom Sawyer, Huck witnesses a crowd of angry people around two figures who have been tarred and feathered. Huck recognizes these figures as the king and the duke. Although he harbors a strong dislike of these men because of their manipulative behavior, he still feels revolted by the display of violence and cruelty. Instead of celebrating their reunion, Huck decides to act as if Jim has been dreaming and Huck has been on the raft the entire night.
Jim's concern turns to confusion, but he finally realizes Huck is lying. He admonishes Huck for the prank and says that only "trash" would treat a friend like that. After a few minutes, Huck feels so ashamed that he apologizes to Jim. Jim and Huck decide that Huck must go ashore to check their progress. Jim's excitement is obvious, and Huck struggles with his shame of helping a slave escape. When Jim says he will steal his children out of slavery if necessary, Huck decides he must go ashore and turn Jim in to the authorities.
Instead of rushing ashore at dawn to free his conscience, however, Huck covers for Jim when he runs into townspeople. Shortly after, Huck and Jim see the clear water of the Ohio River and realize they have passed Cairo in the fog. They decide to buy another canoe to head upriver, but a steamboat wrecks the raft and the two are once again separated. Before , critics largely believed that Twain stopped writing after Chapter 16 and set the manuscript aside.
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