Huck Finn Society and Hypocrisy Quotes

But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck agonizes over whether he should turn in the fugitive slave Jim, as society’s rules demand he should. He tries to come up with something that will “harden” him against the runaway. But his bond of friendship with Jim is so strong and deep, he cannot.

I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” – and tore it up.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck faces a moral dilemma. He realises the Duke and Dauphin have betrayed and sold runaway slave Jim into captivity. If he stands idly by Jim will be transported back to Miss Watson. At first Huck writes a letter to warn Miss Watson, but then decides to tear it up and save Jim. He cannot go along with what he has always been taught, that the slave is property. So he goes against the teaching of his church, elders, and society.

“It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a n*****.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32. Huck lies to Aunt Sally about an explosion on a steamship. Her reaction to a black man being killed reflects the fact that the society in which she lives does not consider the death of a black man important. Upstanding, church-going and caring she may be, but her reaction illustrates the hypocricy of societal mores at the time.

Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings CAN be awful cruel to one another.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 33. Huck on the King and Duke tarred and feathered by the mob. This kind of cruel punishment was common as a type of mob vengeance in the United States. While the conmen deserve to be punished, Huck with his strong sense of conscience feels guilty about the situation.
    • 1
    • 2
Close