Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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 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. 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.

In the beginning of the book, Huck is enmeshed in a very different sort of education under the tutelage of the widow Douglas. This is the more traditional education acquired in school, a type of education intended to civilize the boy:

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever (38).

For Huck, education is only valuable so far as it is practical, and if he cannot use it immediately and directly, he sees no need to know it.

Tom is an overpowering presence when he is on the scene and imposes his view of the world, a highly romantic view, on his f

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but he becomes more aware of the need to make direct choices as to what is right and what is wrong. He has always known intuitively what is right and what is wrong, but he is being exposed to greater and greater senses of what is wrong. The criminality and mean-spiritedness of the Duke an the Dauphin causes Huck to use his wiles to escape from them. The experience also leads to his assessment of slavery and his determination to set Jim free. Huck believes he will go to hell for making this decision, but his humanity is stronger than his notion of social pressures or even of the sort of sin embodied in books. For Huck, doing what is right is a decision made in the heart and not by the law or the bible or any such entity. Even when he is most afraid of the consequences, Huck is true to himself and his human feelings. Huck has to try the various means used by society to make decisions, however. He considers at different times the various codes by which people live. The Grangerfords have a code, but they also kill each other and are killed in turn by their neighbors. The code of the Duke and the Dauphin is immoral and unsatisfactory for Huck. He decides he has to pray, and he thinks he knows what the answer will be when he

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