Awesome / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Jim's "What's trash is trash" speech, which utterly dismantles Huck's amusement at pulling a vicious prank on him. From that point on, Huck (and the reader) treats Jim with much more respect.
• Duke and the King, a pair of treacherous traveling companions, have turned in Jim, leading to his recapture and imprisonment. It falls to Huck to write a letter to Miss Watson, telling her that her escaped slave has been recovered, and how and where she might retrieve him. On the one hand, the prevailing social order of the antebellum American South says that sending that letter is nothing less than what is ordained by God, as is every other aspect of the 'peculiar institution'. Huck's aid in Jim's escape - legally, stealing him - is a mortal sin, and aiding in Jim's recapture serves as expiation. On the other hand, no matter how hard Huck tries, he can't think of Jim as anything else than his best friend, and how they've stood by each other through it all. Then Huck's eyes falls on the letter he's just written, having to decide to follow the rules or his conscience. Huck's decision: Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!.
  "It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog."
  • Pay special attention to the emphasis. Huck doesn't say, "I'll go to hell". He says, "I'll go to hell." He isn't being sent there - he's marching there defiantly. Huck honestly, truly believes that he's going to Hell for rescuing Jim. He does it anyway.
  • Fred Clark, at Slacktivist, calls it "the greatest scene of salvation and redemption in literature".
    "All right, then, I'll go to Hell!" he says. And the angels in heaven rejoice.
    Huck may just be talking to himself there, but I think of that declaration as a prayer — as, in fact, a prayer pleasing to God.
  • It makes it even better to see that the dirty deeds of the Duke and the King caught up with them and they got tarred and feathered.