htful and legal owner or must he follow his gut feeling that he must help Jim to achieve his personal goal to acquire his freedom, even if this illegal cooperation and stealing of people’s property sentences Huck to an eternity in Hell. Huck thinks to himself, “I begun to get it through my head that he was most free and who was to blame for it? Why me. …. What had poor Miss Watson done to you… that you could treat her so mean?” Huck is filled with guilt and loses sleep over worrying about what he has done. Huck has an opportunity in Chapter XVI to turn Jim in to a bounty hunter but he cannot go through with it and rather saves Jim by lying to the man to keep him at bay. Later, in chapter XXXI, Huck decides to write a letter to Miss Watson, divulging the whereabouts of her slave and even informing her that he, Huck, is not really dead. Although the process of writing the letter makes Huck feels cleansed of sin, he realizes that Jim, being a good person and a true friend, deserves Huck’s loyalty. The moral decision is to help Jim to freedom, even if it means committing sin. “ I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ ” . From here on, Huck settles his struggle with his conscience.The narrator and protagonist of the novel is Huckleberry Finn. It is evident that during the course of the book Huck matures greatly. At the start of the book he is a juvenile delinquent who likes to hang out with his fellow mischievous friends, especially Tom Sawyer. He is wild and carefree, playing jokes on people and believing all his pranks to be hilarious. Huck has recently moved in with his foster mother, the Widow Douglas, who is instrumental in his partial reformation. Under her care Huck is learning good manners and Christian t...
