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
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
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