The Education of Huck Finn

Completely innocent characters in fiction are often used by writers as a way of creating an ironic comment on the society in which they live, a society the innocent may not understand but which he or she can still convey to the reader by contrast, understatement, and an ironic counterpoint. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain depicts what could be called "The Education of Huck Finn" as the young man travels down the river and experiences different aspects of the society of his time. Huck is intuitive about what is right, and in the long term what he learns is to trust his intuition, his own innate sense of right and wrong. Huck Finn is the innocent who serves to illuminate the hypocrisy and corruption of society through his pragmatic nature, his willingness to accept others until they show their true colors, and his innate sense of honor and fairness.

Huck from the beginning is a character who follows his own mind and who values the ability to do things rather than to know the book-learning valued by society. Huck does not learn the sort of thing found in books, and indeed Twain uses this novel as a way of making fun of a certain genre of books, the sort of high adventures that fascinate Tom Sawyer and that are very different from the real world in which Tom and Huck live. The education of Huck Finn is an education in the hypocrisy that besets so many different levels of society. In the beginning of the novel, Huck is enmeshed in a very different sort of

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e Grangerfords are a well-to-do family of slaveowners. There is a good deal of irony in the way Huck describes these people as opposed to the reality of their lives. Huck says of them, Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family (101). The family lives in a nice house, very civilized by Huck's standards, and they follow a code and go to church every Sunday. Yet, when they do go to church, they always carry guns. They listen to sermons about brotherly love, and then during the week they shoot one another in feuds that have origins they cannot even remember. The lesson for Huck is that the freedom he has enjoyed on the river is far better than the stifling and dangerous atmosphere on the shore: I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't (108). The contrast between the river and the shore embodies a sharp sense of the conflicts ruling American society at the time: The power of Huckleberry Finn lies in the way it dramatizes the contradictions in nineteenth-century America. It is a society where respectable

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