Even though Mark Twain decided to start out The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a type of “abandon all hope” warning when it comes to finding a moral in his exciting account of American youth, the foundation of his argument, that there is no moral, is counterintuitive due to the nature of storytelling. To understand this idea better, let us consider a question that English professors at the University of Portland propose to their “Thinking Through Literature” course as the theme for their semester long journey through the depths of all things literature: “why read?”. In the face of this question, many students respond with suggestions such as “for entertainment,” “to understand others better,” and even the occasional “because my professor
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This is not an ethics paper, though, so instead of arguing morality in general, we will apply an analytical English lens in order to bring a more appropriate argument into focus: the morality that comes along with literature. To do this, let us look at a passage that is perhaps one of the most widely referenced excerpts from the …show more content…
He then juxtaposes this idea of “good”-ness with a societal concept of morality, being “washed clean of sin.” He combines the two of these–being “good” and being “clean of sin”–to suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the two can be reconciled to one another. This suggests that morality, even that which is found through literature, is not as clear as being one thing or another. It also underscores the importance of that self-discovered morality, though, because this sentence describes both self-defined morality and socially-defined morality, not just one or the other, and, more importantly, illuminates the benefits of combining the two when the narrator describes the relief with, “for the first time I had ever felt so in my life,” a statement that suggests that the feeling was appreciated by the narrator. So the moral codes of society and the moral codes from an individual’s study can come together to form one large moral code for said
This is not an ethics paper, though, so instead of arguing morality in general, we will apply an analytical English lens in order to bring a more appropriate argument into focus: the morality that comes along with literature. To do this, let us look at a passage that is perhaps one of the most widely referenced excerpts from the …show more content…
He then juxtaposes this idea of “good”-ness with a societal concept of morality, being “washed clean of sin.” He combines the two of these–being “good” and being “clean of sin”–to suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the two can be reconciled to one another. This suggests that morality, even that which is found through literature, is not as clear as being one thing or another. It also underscores the importance of that self-discovered morality, though, because this sentence describes both self-defined morality and socially-defined morality, not just one or the other, and, more importantly, illuminates the benefits of combining the two when the narrator describes the relief with, “for the first time I had ever felt so in my life,” a statement that suggests that the feeling was appreciated by the narrator. So the moral codes of society and the moral codes from an individual’s study can come together to form one large moral code for said