return Ms. Watson’s property. However, he attributes his final decision to help Jim, not to his own compassion and benevolence, but to his wickedness, bad upbringing, and failure to attend Sunday school. Nor does Huck feel he is able to pray as long as he cannot bring himself to notify Ms. Watson of Jim’s location. Also, his society’s religion has taught him that he will be damned to hell for helping a slave escape, fate to which e replies, “All right, then, I’ll go to Hell”(210). The two separate quests for freedom, Jim’s quest to escape from the institution of slavery, and Huck’s quest to escape fro the moral standards of society, meet together and combine to form the ultimate freedom, “It is a freedom achieved in imprisonment, the freedom of solitude in loving company”(221 LohF). While alone, Huck cannot grasp the psychological needs of loving and belonging, but while under the stronghold of society, he has trouble reaching even his safety needs. While under the supervision of Jim, conversely, Huck is able to meet his safety needs, love and belongingness needs, and reach a higher step on the hierarchy. He is able to gain the freedom that he looks for while with Jim, but it keeps Jim from gaining the freedom he seeks. The only instance in the novel where Huck and Jim both acquire the freedom they need is “the freedom of those two or three days between the Grangerfords and the first arrival of the Duke and King, the freedom we barely have a chance to remember before their second arrival, is a freedom neither Huck nor Jim sets out to find; but it is the only freedom they ever share” (221 lohf). Sadly, this freedom fades and Huck and Jim go back to the original freedom that they seek. When Jim finally gains the freedom that he fought so strongly for from a piece of paper, it is almost ironic. The freedom that he pursued turns out to be a freedom that he ha...
