Individual vs. Society: Tracing Huck’s Educational Trajectory in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Mark Twain described Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat." The book enacts a struggle betwixt Huck’s conscience, a receptacle of societal ideology, norms, custom and law and his ‘innate goodness of nature,’ wherein the contending factions are equally strong and metamorphose Huck’s experiences from simply being ‘playful adventures,’ akin to that of his comrade Tom, into an understanding of ‘nature’s goodness.’ In delineating this transfiguration, Twain sets about the painstaking task of foregrounding the qualities of Huck, that undergo a refinement/education and mark ...
