Welcoming the Stranger

Mark Twain uses a reoccurring theme of incorporating strangers or outsiders into his stories to open up the eyes of both the characters and the readers to make them really contemplate their beliefs and practices.  Throughout the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck has a very difficult time determining what is right and what is wrong.  At the beginning of his story, Huck explains that the Widow Douglass and Miss Watson are trying to “sivilize” him by teaching him both educational and religious values; we see that these values are contradictory as both women are slave owners, but we do not know if Huck sees the inconsistency.  Later on in the story we see Huck’s internal struggle between turning Jim in (the right thing to do by law) and letting him stay (the morally higher thing to do).  Huck states, “Well then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?  I was stuck.  I couldn’t answer that.  So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother not more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.” (Twain 104).  Huck sort of shrugs off the notion of trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, and this internal struggle seems to go back and forth without reaching a conclusion.  Huck ends up not telling on Jim, and their relationship develops into something of a twisted friendship where the both try and look out for each other but often with ulterior motives.   Then the two encounter the king and the duke, a pair of strangers who commit acts that cause Huck to question morality again, and we see him make some decisions that lead us to believe that maybe his ideas are maturing.

During their first fraud, the king and the duke bring in a large amount of money by scamming a town into coming to their “Royal Nonesuch” play.  Huck does not seem to question their motives, and seems impressed by the amount of money they were able to retrieve from the foolish townspeople.  However, in their next act, the king and the duke play a horrible trick on a town, specifically on a family that is mourning the death of a loved one.  Huck starts to feel bad that the king and the duke are stealing the inheritance of the man that had died.   He is so bothered by the acts that are occur in order to continue with the prank that he internalizes it and demonstrates it physically to the point where it makes him feel sick.  After thinking it over, Huck explains to the reader, “I felt so ornery and low down and mean, that I says to myself, My mind’s made up; I’ll hive that money for them or bust.” (Twain 188).  This is the first point where Huck makes a conscious decision to fix something that was ‘wrong’ and make it ‘right’.  As a reader we can see that these two strangers came in and committed acts that caused Huck to question what is morally right and wrong, and Huck decides to go against what is lawfully right (not stealing) and do something that is on a higher level of morality: get the money away from the con artists and try and get it back into the hands of its rightful heirs.  This can be interpreted as Huck slowly starting to decide for himself what is considered right and wrong.

Despite this turning point however, it is difficult for the reader to be fully convinced that Huck realizes what is truly morally right and wrong, as he still cannot get past the idea of the differences between white and black.  Huck uses the phrase, “Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger.” (Twain 175).  In saying this Huck seems to make the notion that the likeliness of him seeing an act like that of the king and the duke again is equivalent to the likeliness that he would ever be a ‘nigger’: impossible.  Huck still does not seem to understand the harm in treating human beings as property, and does not recognize that slaves were just as human as white people were and there is a moral injustice in selling human beings as property.  So on one side of the spectrum we see the strangers helping Huck, in a backhanded way, to realize that there are acts that are morally wrong and that sometimes they need to be righted, but on the other side of the spectrum, as readers, we see that Huck still has a long way to go in developing his moral conscience.  The strangers serve as a wakeup call to both the characters in the story as well as to the reader to keep all eyes open and recognize that there is always something to question and that sometimes the answers are not found on the surface.

Works Cited:

 Twain, Mark.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Penguin Group Ltd., 2003. Print.