Characterization of scoundrels in Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's Version Of The Inferno: The Moral Structure Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a kind of American Dante's Inferno. The novel begins in civilized society, yet Huck and Jim must flee the confines of the genteel town in which they live to learn more about life as they travel on a raft down the Mississippi. Huck must leave because of his cruel and drunken father. Jim must run because he does not want to be sold down South by his 'owner' Miss Watson. The two companions, one white, one black are bonded by friendship. On their way, they encounter scoundrels like two Shakespearean actors who style themselves as great thespians, and the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons who combine family feuding with piety.

The purest souls in Twain's world are those characters like Huck and Jim, who look at society with honest eyes, untainted by hypocrisy. Jim is Huck's Virgil, a guide who teaches the young boy what is really important in life. It is Jim who praises Huck when Huck lies to protect Jim. In one incident, Huck cleverly says that his father has smallpox, scaring away the men from the raft where Jim is hiding, because the men looking for escaped slaves. Huck feels guilty because he is stealing Jim, which goes against the morality he has been taught at the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson's, yet he cannot expose his friend with a clear conscience.

Twain suggests to the reader that Huck's action is a good action, and Huck's natural emotions, rather than imposed social laws, should have greater moral weight. Whenever Huck is forced to make a moral dilemma, he always makes the correct choice. The men looking for Jim merely want a bounty; they do not see Jim as a human being. For Twain, what is natural is good -- natural human instinct. Huck presents himself at the beginning of the novel as a bad boy, resisting religion and engaging in pranks as part of his friend Tom Sawyer's gang. But the intrusion of Huck's drunken father quickly shows the reader what real evil looks like. And Huck's father is far from the worst character in the novel. Miss Watson owns another human being according to the laws of the land, even while she evangelizes. Tom Sawyer, the 'good' rapscallion who only plays at the dark life of a wild boy torments Jim before revealing the fact that Jim is free. Tom does not understand the true meaning of freedom, and so he engages in a kind of sick adolescent joke when Jim is being held captive by Tom's relatives the Phelps.

Over and over again the novel mocks hypocrisy and ignorance: for example, the young Grangerford girl who died young and sketched beautiful and morbid works of art lived in a world where families would pray and shoot themselves. The Shakespearean actors who pretend to have culture (they call themselves the 'duke' and the 'dauphin') attempt to extort the money from the kindly Wilks only meet their comeuppance because of Huck's revelation of their schemes. People who make pretences of either faith or aristocracy thus rot in the lowest pits of Twain's hell.