Morality In Huck Finn's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

The book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tell the tale of a young boy who embarks on an adventure, one that leads him to find himself. Throughout the novel Huck develops a sense of morality that was always there to begin with, but not nearly as developed as it is by the end of the novel. Through living on his own, independent of societal and peer pressures, Huck is able to identify his own morals in defining what is 'right ' or 'wrong '.

Originally, Huck Finn lacks an individual sense of moral sensibility. His is instead influenced by those around him, like his friends, family, and school. Huck thinks to himself, “Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn’t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean… That

After Huck asks Tom why he tried to free a free slave, and Tom told him about how they’d become heroes and what not, Tom says to himself, “But I reckened it was about as well the way it was”(pg.291). Here, we see that Huck has really become dormant in his own thinking, and seeks to know what others like Tom think. Interestingly, by the end of the novel he has become somewhat submissive and willing to listen to what he is told to do, but still with an overall heightened sense of morality that developed throughout his adventures.

It’s natural for humans to forget about finding our own opinions, especially when surrounding by people who tell them what they should think and what is good for them or bad for them. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn conveys this idea even further, showing how a young boy living alone learns what he truly believes in, regardless of what he was raised to believe. As presidential elections come around, Huck Finn may inspire us all to tune in with our own opinions, and tune out the media and peer pressure on whose policies we agree with the