Trace Huck's troubled conscience in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Identify what his conflict is, what the irony of the conflict is, where it...

Huck is beset by a troubled conscience from early on in
the novel. When he sees his friends and the widow searching for his dead body, Huck
finds himself in a lonesome place. Soon, however, he meets Jim and his real dilemma
begins. 

Jim makes Huck promise not to turn him in to the
authorities and Huck agrees. In this moment, Huck realizes that he is siding with Jim
against society and the laws of that society. 

readability="6">

People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and
despise me for keeping mum—but that don't make no
difference.

The way that his
culture works in him, Huck believes that crime is equivalent to sin. This leads to a
deep conflict in Huck as he attempts to justify helping Jim escape to freedom throughout
the novel. In all his efforts, he cannot shake the sense that his actions will condemn
him and that helping Jim, a good friend and a nice man, is a
sin. 

Huck folds to this crisis on one occasion, but
changes his mind at the last minute. He leaves Jim on the raft with the intention of
turning him in, then covers for him when questioned by two men on the river. Here, as
later, Huck is faced with what he sees as two paths - act morally according to society
or act morally according to his own sense of right and
wrong. 

As always, Huck chooses to do what he feels is
right. His native sense of morality works more strongly in him, despite the fact that he
cannot disbelieve in society's moral
authority. 

Ultimately, Huck decides to abandon at least
the agonies of conscience because he cannot abandon this sense that society is invested
with true moral authority. He cannot agree with the morality of certain laws, and so he
cannot follow them. He also cannot escape his sense of the religious potency of these
laws. 

The decision to help Jim escape from the Phelps
represents Huck's final acquiescence to the idea that conscience will harass a person no
matter what he does. One must therefore think for oneself and act. This is his
conclusion. 

The situation that describes the last
iteration of Huck's dilemma is ironic for two reasons. First, Jim is already free. Huck
need not agonize about helping him escape. His crisis is real for him, but false in a
circumstantial sense.

Second, from today's perspective, the
institution of slavery is immoral. Helping someone to escape from an immoral imposition
is definitively moral.