Some of the absurdity in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is of course the result of taking religion too literally. Sometimes that means Huck and Tom and others times the civilized people. Taking religion literally is always risky. As Huck reported early in the book, after he got in trouble for failing to behave as he so often did:

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hook three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me but she said I was a fool. She never told me why and I couldn’t make it no way.”

How could it be that religion worked for people like Miss Watson and not Huck? He must be doing something wrong. So again, he did what he always did, he thought about it. As Huck said,

“I set down one time way back in the woods and had a long think about it. I said to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?  Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No says I, to myself, there ain’t nothing in it.  If I went and told the widow about it and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.”

Interestingly, this later of course turned out to be true, for Huck really did spiritual gifts when he ignored his own welfare and thought just of Jim.

Though Huck was not satisfied with this advice he actually soaked it in through osmosis for later that is exactly what he did when he saved Jim for the slave hunters and he won Jim’s freedom and in doing so won his own freedom as well! It was marvellous advice but it didn’t’ smell right to Huck.  Such advice always seemed like a con to a rapscallion like Huck but it really is the best advice he could get.

Pap, his father,  on the other hand gave him the worst possible advice. He taught him how to lie and steal as much as he could and only look out for himself.

Tom Sawyer on the other hand advised Huck to get his advice from books like Don Quixote because they were all about “enchantment.” I would have thought this would have been pretty good advice actually, but later in the book we learn how crazy it was when someone like Tom Sawyer takes his books as literally as the Bible Thumpers take theirs. Tom even said, “I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed  in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me, I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school.”

An independent thinker like Huck would avoid the traps of traditional belief if he could, but he found it very hard, as he later learns. He puts eternal life on the line! You can’t get braver than that.