The Role of Slavery in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn leaves no character unaffected by the damage of slavery. The Huckleberry Finn Jim literally suffers the effects of imprisoning bondage, but it is Huck who is struck by the full heart-rending impact of the illogical and immoral standards of the time. The king and the duke who are foolish, hypocritical, and profit-seeking conmen benefit from human peddling. Slavery, it seems, is a tool of the weak to control the strong. The novel features both an explicit and implicit societal constraint imposed on the novel's inhabitants, most notably Huck and Jim.

Jim serves as a catalyst for Huck's growth as a human being by playing the part of a highly compassionate, friendly individual whose unwavering loyalty incites the internal conflict affecting Huck. Instead of falling back to aggression and malice, his moral center is not perverted beyond recognition when tricked by "joke" schemes in which Huck himself takes part, however reluctant. Across the novel, his very fidelity inspires Huck to cast away the phantom possibility of an eternity in the depths of Hell.

Huck is burdened by the environment he is placed in. Unable to accept conventional manners and regulations he finds restraining and pointless, he is nevertheless more practically sound than the civilization of his upbringing. He differs markedly from the flamboyant Tom Sawyer, who reflects a free nature taken to the extreme. Tom Sawyer's attitude may be seen as anarchic and purely hedonistic in contrast to sensible and open. Huck, unlike Tom, survives the intellectual indoctrination of southern society by superseding it with his own, more rational worldview. Unfortunately, the specter of popular morality did not remove its vice grip from his mind, as the twisted perception that it is he who is erroneous remained.

The fraudulent business ventures undertaken by the duke and the king represent the outrageousness of the entire concept behind ownership of humans. As slaves to their own ineptitude, their escapades, along with slavery, eventually fail. The entire physical trek across the country to escape a concept that should have not existed in the first place is a parody of the sad state of affairs that benefit crooks and impede decent individuals like Huck and Jim from achieving their full potential.

The entire universe they inhabit is a facade, serious by its racist nature and comical by its complete disregard for logic. It is ludicrous yet disheartening that society can so compartmentalize and ignore an evil that reduces humans to the status of mere property. Huck's acceptance of Jim's humanity comes at the great caveat of intellectual rejection. This hints that slavery is a deep lie that society convinces itself to believe. Huck and Jim are only themselves in isolation, with no rules to guide them but their own. The very idea that society imprisons thoughts before they form is counterproductive to the betterment of itself.