huckleberry finn morality essay

Morality and Humane Traits in Huckleberry Finn Essay

It is common sense that the commitment of crime is punished and persecuted in every human society. The question of morality is prevalent here: for several millennia, people were devising the formula for what deed is acceptable and what deed is not. Complex judicial systems were established as the societies have moved into more civilized states – all that humongous amount of human effort and thought for one single purpose. That purpose is the eradication of negative patterns in society, ones that do not adhere to its moral and civil rules.

The deeds that denigrate our societies, making them vile and degrading, spiraling into corruption and vice, are usually those that every member of the human community would name. The primary ones would be committing murder, rape, treason, robbery, and theft. Despite those crimes being ages-old, even those at one point were not criminalized activities. This idea is fluid – with the inevitable development of human society, specific actions are criminalized as it is recognized as detrimental to its further progression in a more refined, civilized state.

Although this model is accurate, the process of shaping people’s collective ethics is not linear. At different points in history, humanity took backward steps and endured periods of stagnation and degradation. Some of the norms accepted not as far back as two hundred years ago are appalling to the modern mind and often cause strong reactions as to what kinds of horrible injustices took place then. This is key to understanding how fluid moral norms are: what may be perceived as appropriate in a specific period of a society may shift entirely if the circumstances change.

There is one reason it is possible to say that there are, indeed, conditions under which it is appropriate to break the law. It is a fact that social norms are exceptionally fluid and highly subjective. They usually reflect their time’s ideals and concepts prevailing the general public’s opinions. Solely because of that, I can say that it is feasible for me to break the law. However, a number of conditions must also be met.

The most important one, in the presence of which it is possible for the author to commit a legal crime, is the fact that doing otherwise would cross my own ethical values. As an example, saving one’s loved one from suffering or death when the law orders to do otherwise cannot be considered a crime as far as the author is concerned. Such instances often occur under authoritarian governments, and therefore, have happened and continue to do so in the present – since totalitarianism is a part of our reality.

These are the circumstances that can lead me to break the law. Humanistic values are revered higher than the institution of direction in my personal worldview. The same thing applies to any live being – whether a human or an animal – it is against my personal values to cause suffering to them. Evidently, in order to break the law, one needs to understand the subjectivity etched into its design: however, it is not enough. The reason for doing so needs to be of exceeding moral quality.

The moral deed that sets the narrative of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into motion can serve as a good example. The protagonist understands the values of his time. However, he acts independently of them and, indeed, makes the right decision. One can be sure to notice that his choice has reaffirmed itself via a test of time – as we, the readers, judge his actions with a more progressed worldview. It is seen in his first reaction, “I was ever so glad to see Jim. I wasn’t lonesome now” (Twain 58). Huckleberry acts righteously because his action is driven by his heart, which is non-discriminative, non-judgmental, and not polluted by the ideas of the crippling system in place.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . E-ArtNow, 2017. E-ArtNow. Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "Morality and Humane Traits in Huckleberry Finn." July 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/morality-and-humane-traits-in-huckleberry-finn/.

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Article Contents

• I Introduction
• II Huck Finn’s Conscience
• III Moral Language and Moral Education
• IV Concluding Remarks
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Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education

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Anders Schinkel, Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education , Volume 45, Issue 3, August 2011, Pages 511–525, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00805.x

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The aim of this article is twofold. Against the traditional interpretation of ‘the conscience of Huckleberry Finn’ (for which Jonathan Bennett’s article with this title is the locus classicus) as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, I propose a new interpretation of Huck’s inner conflict, in terms of Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language and its integration with his moral feelings. The second aim is to show how this interpretation can provide insight into a particular aspect of moral education: learning a moral language. A moral education that has a proper regard for the flexibility of moral language and the importance of the integration of moral language and (pre-)moral feelings should prevent such conflicts as Huck experienced from arising.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Mark Twain — Huck’S Moral Development In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain

Huck’s Moral Development in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

• Categories: Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

About this sample

Words: 547 |

Published: May 19, 2020

Words: 547 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Arnett, J. J., & Jensen, L. A. (2002). A congregation of one: Individualized religious beliefs among emerging adults. Journal of Adolescent Research, 17(5), 451-467.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.
• Côté, J. E., & Levine, C. G. (2002). Identity formation, agency, and culture: A social psychological synthesis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Foster, T. C. (2003). How to read literature like a professor: A lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines. HarperCollins.
• Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In T. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive development and epistemology (pp. 151-235). Academic Press.
• Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551-558.
• Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. Free Press.
• Twain, M. (1884). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles L. Webster & Company.

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Critic’s Notebook

‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction

How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

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By A.O. Scott

One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.

“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.

The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?

Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”

Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .

As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.

“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.

Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .

“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.

I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.

As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.

“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.

That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)

One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.

Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”

In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.

For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.

Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.

James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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