Friendship in Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn

The Friendship of Huck and Jim

As Huck and Jim drift on to Cairo, Huck begins to feel that Jim is displaying more hubris than a runaway slave should. His "civilized" self begins to come to the surface and he contemplates turning Jim in as it would be the "right" thing to do -- after all, Jim does belong to Miss Watson and not to himself. The struggle in Huck at this point is between his emerging friendship with Jim and his sense of what "society" deems proper. Huck has always rebelled against "proper" values, but now that he is on his own he is unsure of the way and falls back on "proper" values from time to time as a crutch. However, Huck has a strong conscience informed by natural sense and it is this sense that will not allow him to betray Jim, especially when he sees how nasty "civilized" people can be. Huck understands that Jim has more character and virtue than "civilized" people and this, coupled with Huck's ability to sympathize with outcasts, makes them a good pair of friends. This paper will examine Huck and Jim's friendship and how it is based on a deep probing of the nature of right and wrong.

The friendship between Huck and Jim is based in the beginning on the fact that they are both in a sense runaways. Huck is running away from Pap and Jim from slavery. They are identical in this sense and thus it is natural that their journeys should merge. But as their journey goes along, Huck begins to see that Jim is a man with a family and that he should be able to be with his family. Huck sympathizes with Jim and Jim acts as a kind of surrogate father to Huck.

However, as Huck begins to think of all the nice things Miss Watson did for him, he feels guilty about helping Jim run away. He feels that he is betraying Miss Watson. It is his affection for Miss Watson that now comes welling up inside Huck. For a moment this displaces his budding friendship with Jim, as Jim begins to feel freer and freer.

The way that Huck is brought back around to feeling guilty about betraying Jim to the men looking for a runaway slave is this: as Huck is paddling out to meet the men, Jim calls Huck the "best friend" he's ever had (Twain 161). Huck doesn't want to feel like he is betraying anyone, and since at the moment it feels as though he would be betraying Jim, he decides to lie to the men and say that everyone on the raft is sick so that they won't search it and find Jim. He rationalizes this change of mood by saying discerning what's right and what's wrong is too hard to tell, so he will just do whatever is "handiest" (Twain 162).