I think Twain was fascinated by the southern culture he grew up in and he understood it well. In the book we find his view of it through the eyes of the title character, Huck. Twain is adept at showing us how skewed antebellum Southern society was in its thinking and its morality.
Throughout the book we find young Huck struggling against his own conscience when it comes to making decisions about right and wrong. Often he goes against his own conscience to do what we know is the right thing to do--for example, helping runaway slave Jim to escape his captors. Huck's conscience tells him that helping Jim re-escape is a horrible thing to do, something he could go to hell for. Meanwhile, another part of his conscience is remembering how good Jim has been to him and all of Jim's unselfish acts toward Huck. In the end, Huck decides to defy his conscience and help his friend Jim no matter what it costs him, even if it costs him his soul. He says to himself, "All right, then, I'll go to hell."
A few pages later Huck sums up what is wrong with the human conscience:
"So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehow--though I hadn't done nothing. But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does, I would pison him. It takes no more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same."In a few days I'm going to post something on the human conscience from a Christian perspective, so I won't say much here and now. But suffice it to say that just as all other parts of our nature are fallen, so is our conscience. And, as with Huck, it often misleads us when it is ill-informed or uninformed or tainted with error and/or immorality.
More to come.
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