Huckleberry Finn Teaches About Grace.

How can anyone not like Huckleberry Finn, the character or the novel? I empathize with him, I sympathize with him, I so want to educate him and help him along the right path.

If you've ever read the novel you might remember that the plot centers around Huck and Jim and their trip on a raft down the Mississippi River. Huck is running from his father and Jim is running away from his owner because he had heard he was about to be sold down the river (a fate worse than death). The story is related in the first person and in Huck's own voice. Twain captures the various dialects of the time perfectly.

Along the way they pick up a couple of con-men, known as the king and the duke, who use Jim, Huck, and their raft to further their scandalous trade. This brings us to the part where Huck really touched a chord in me.

The king and the duke are conning a local family into believing that they are long lost brothers to a man who has just died, arriving just in time for the funeral and, of course, the distribution of the will. The deceased's daughters are the ones being defrauded and Huck feels sorry for them. He begins working to foil the king and the duke in their plans. Finally he cannot contain himself and, in spite of his fears, he spills the beans to the oldest daughter that the king and duke are frauds and that he has a plan to expose them. There follows an emotional scene in which Huck expresses his admiration for her and she her gratitude toward him.

He writes her a note telling her all and hands it to her. Then this in Huck's voice:

It made my eyes water a little, to remember her crying there all by herself in the night, and them devils laying there right under her own roof, shaming her and robbing her; and when I folded it up and give it to her, I see the water come into her eyes, too; and she shook me by the hand, hard, and says:

"Good-bye--I'm going to do everything just as you've told me; and if I don't ever see you again, I sha'n't ever forget you, and I'll think of you a many and a many of time, and I'll pray for you too!"--and she was gone.

Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same--she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion--there warn't no back-down to her, I judge. You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain't no flattery. And when it comes to beauty--and goodness too--she lays over them all. I hain't ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain't ever seen her since, but I reckon I've thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I'd a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn't a done it or bust.

This is a natural human response to grace, i.e. undeserved kindness. While Miss Mary Jane is offering this kindness to Huck because she feels he deserves it, Huck knows better. He knows that he doesn't really deserve any such kindness at all, for, in spite of the fact that he has helped this girl, and in spite of his own warped conscience and sense of morality, he still has a keen sense of his own depravity. In a real sense, Huck's response to the girl's offer of prayer is the Christian response to any and all goodness God shows to us in this life. We deserve nothing from God at all for we have spent our whole lives in rebellion to him in one form or another. And, yet, God loves us, and is kind to us, and when we grasp that our response to that grace should be similar to Huck Finn: I don't deserve any of this but I'll strive to show some kind of love in return in any way I can.

Huckleberry Finn and Conscience

I'm just about finished with my re-reading of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It has been a joyous read. I love Mr. Twain's work and after completing his Complete Short Stories last year I decided to give Huck Finn another twirl.

My first impressions were that it is not a children's book. Though it is the sequel to Tom Sawyer and Tom Sawyer is a children's book, Huck Finn is much more sophisticated and cerebral. It is a morality play.

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.