The Whole Hog
Thoughts on the moral climax of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There are moments in literature when a character’s moral awakening is so honest, so painfully human, that it brushes against the very borders of grace. One such moment comes not in the sanctity of a cathedral nor in the eloquence of a sermon, but on a muddy riverbank, in the heart of a boy who can scarcely spell “conscience.” I am speaking, of course, of Huck Finn—who, believing himself damned, performs the most righteous act of his life.
Huck’s education in religion has been of the unfortunate sort that confuses heaven with social respectability and God with the local gentry. From the beginning of the story, he’s been taught that the Almighty’s favor rests upon well-pressed Sunday clothes and the proper ownership of human beings. His “Christian” mentors have prayed over their biscuits while planning to sell Jim “down the river.” When such is one’s catechism, disbelief becomes the first act of faith.
It is in this moral fog that Huck finds himself wrestling. On one hand lies the religion of his upbringing—a counterfeit gospel which calls slavery virtue and compassion sin. On the other hand, his growing love for Jim has quietly rewritten all his notions of good and evil. He trembles, torn between his heart and his theology, between the command of his elders and the whisper of conscience. Then comes the moment that cleaves his soul in two: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
This, I think, is the truest conversion scene in American literature. For what Huck imagines as rebellion is in fact obedience—obedience to the divine law written deeper than dogma, the law of love. In that instant, Huck chooses mercy over the “morality” of his age, and by doing so, he chooses heaven while thinking himself condemned to hell. Irony has seldom been so sanctified.
Mark Twain, for all his cynicism toward religion, gives us here a picture worthy of Bunyan or Dante. Huck’s descent into supposed perdition is his purgation. The boy who believes he’s falling into darkness is, in truth, walking into the light. And when he adds, with that rough humor of his, “…because as long as I was in, and in for the good, I might as well go the whole hog,” we glimpse something profoundly Christian. For is this not what Christ Himself demands? “Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth” (Rev 3:16 NRSV). Huck, in his ignorance, has stumbled upon the very thing theologians spend volumes describing: the surrender of the divided self. His faith is not doctrinal but incarnate—it takes the shape of loyalty to a man whom society calls less than human. And by that loyalty, Huck becomes most human himself. We might say, then, that Huck’s journey down the Mississippi is no mere boy’s adventure, but an allegory of the soul. Each bend in the river brings him closer to a truer vision of God. The “baptism” he receives is not by water but by conscience: he dies to the world’s false righteousness and rises, still dripping with doubt, into grace. And so, Huck, trembling and torn, decides to “go the whole hog.” He believes he is choosing hell, but he is, at that very moment, stepping toward heaven.
Works Cited
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edited by Mary R. Reichardt, Ignatius Critical Editions, 2009.
The C. S. Lewis Bible. Edited by the C. S. Lewis Foundation, New Revised Standard Version, HarperOne, 2010.