Conscience Against Society

Huck faces one of literature's most famous moral crises: whether to turn Jim in. Everything he has been taught — church, school, law, and community — says helping an escaped slave is a sin that will send him to hell. His answer is one of fiction's greatest lines: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."

Huck's natural empathy overrides every lesson society has taught him. Twain shows that institutional morality can be deeply immoral, and that a barely educated boy can make a better ethical choice than every respectable citizen in his world because he chooses human connection over society's rules.