Brave is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Pretty much anyone—particularly a woman, it seems—who tells a personal story, changes a view, or bucks a trend (which is itself a trend) is likely to earn the accolade brave. Although bravery and courage are often used synonymously today, the history of the word brave has some interesting differences from courage. The older meanings of brave include some that are far from virtuous: “cutthroat,” “villain,” “crooked,” and “depraved.”1 The current meaning of brave is closely allied to the word bold, which isn’t attached to virtue or vice. Boldness can be bad just as it can be good. In a culture as fragmented as ours, nearly anyone who takes a stand on something can find support somewhere. Right or wrong, anyone who is bold will be considered brave by someone.

Virtuous courage, in contrast, is more than boldness for boldness’s sake. Courage is measured not by the risk it entails but by the good it preserves.

The virtue of courage is exemplified in the 2015 news story of three passengers on a high-speed train bound for Paris who subdued a rifle-wielding terrorist on the train just before he attacked. A later interview with one of the heroes, a US National Guardsman, hints that such courage wasn’t accidental but rather the result of habits ingrained by military training. “In the beginning it was mostly gut instinct, survival,” he explained. “Our training kicked in after the struggle.”2

The person who is virtuously courageous displays not merely a single act of courage but the habit of courage. Courage—or fortitude, as it is often called—is defined most succinctly by moral philosophers and theologians as the habit that enables a person to face difficulties well.3 This is a seemingly simple definition, but much is packed into those three terms. What does it mean to “face” something? What makes something “difficult”? And what does it mean to face a difficulty “well”? Understanding how the virtue of courage is tied to these components points to the difference between it and mere bravery.

COURAGE AND THE HEART

The word courage comes from the same root word that means “heart.” To be encouraged is to be heartened or made stronger. When we exhort a person to “take heart,” we mean for her to stand strong and be of good courage. It is noteworthy, too, that we use the word heart to signify our desires and passions. When someone says she has “a heart for the poor,” for example, it means she has a passion for the good of poor people. When the Bible says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21), the word heart, likewise, suggests passion and desire.

It might seem hard at first to see the connection between courage and desire, but courage, ultimately, demonstrates that one’s desires have been rightly ordered to put first things first—even to the point of laying down one’s life for something of even greater value. The person who enters a burning building to rescue a child inside values that child’s life more than his own. We can see similarly proper ordering even with more mundane acts of courage. A person’s great desire to avoid fumbling for words in front of people might be surpassed by her love for the newlywed couple to whom she wishes to offer a toast. One of the most courageous people I know simply got herself out of bed and to work every day (well, almost every day) after her new marriage came to a devastating end, and she would have preferred simply to die rather than go on from day to day. Courage requires putting a greater good before a lesser good. Courage is getting your heart in the right place at the right time despite the obstacles.

Huckleberry Finn is a boy who is all heart. And Huckleberry Finn is the story of that boy getting his heart in the right place as he learns to rightly order his desires.

Huck doesn’t start out courageous. In fact, poor Huck begins his story as a forlorn, neglected little fellow, a bit of a pushover to his strong-willed pal Tom Sawyer. When the novel opens, Huck has spent much of his short and unfortunate life running from the varied troubles that ceaselessly dog him. Having known only hardship, Huck has no sense of proportion and runs as determinedly from the Widow Douglas’s attempts at “sivilizing” him as from the brutal “lickings” he receives at the hands of his drunken and abusive father.4

But by the story’s end, Huck finds his courage, albeit accidentally, through circumstances that come partly from his own doing and partly from sheer bad luck. In depicting this attainment of virtue through a combination of consequence and coincidence, Huckleberry Finn reflects the way life falls out for most of us most of the time: some choices we face are the result of our own doings, others completely outside of our control, most some combination of the two. How much nicer it would be not to face difficulties at all. Given the impossibility of that, the next best thing is to face hard circumstances with the virtue of courage.

We are introduced to Huck’s boyish heart early in the story in a humorous passage that pokes fun at the empty religiosity of Huck’s society (a frequent target of Mark Twain’s satire). The pharisaical Miss Watson tries to impart religion to Huck in various ways, among them the practice of prayer. Her lessons suggest to Huck (as similar lessons have suggested to many people across the ages) that the purpose of prayer is to get us the things we want. Miss Watson, Huck says, “told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it.” To his dismay, Huck discovers “it warn’t so.” Still, Huck doesn’t give up, but keeps trying to make prayer work. “Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work,” he laments. Finally, he concludes that “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 snuffbox that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to my self, there ain’t nothing in it.”5 It’s an amusing picture. But it’s also one that resonates for most of us if we’re honest. There’s a little bit of the prosperity gospel in all of American Christianity, and this has been true ever since the country was founded upon the very idea of that pursuit of happiness we call the American Dream.6

THE WORK OF PRAYER

After Huck has run away down the river, he concedes that perhaps prayer does work, if only for others and not for him. At this point, Huck has grown terribly hungry, and he remembers that it’s customary for searchers to float bread loaded with quicksilver to locate a drowned body (which he is presumed to be). When he soon enough locates some of the bread (and fine-quality bread at that) and eats his fill, it occurs to Huck, “The widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it. So there ain’t no doubt but there is something in that thing—that is, there’s something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don’t work for me, and I reckon it don’t work for only just the right kind.”7

Yet despite his grudging admission, Huck still doesn’t see that prayer isn’t about changing one’s circumstance but about changing one’s heart. The Widow Douglas had attempted to explain this to Huck after he complained to her that his prayers weren’t working. She told him then that “the thing a body could get by praying for it was ‘spiritual gifts.’” Huck recalls her explaining to him that “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.”8 In other words, his desire—his heart or courage—must be to put others before himself. Such a thing seems impossible to young Huck. But this effect of prayer is fulfilled by the end of the story.

NO COURAGE IN A MOB

The novel’s most explicit passage about courage occurs in an abrupt and startling scene that, on the surface, appears to be just one more in a series of adventures with an endless stream of characters briefly introduced into the story and never heard from again. Yet the seriousness of the scene contrasts so sharply with the comedy that characterizes the rest of the story that it stands out in significance.

While traveling with two con men that Huck and Jim (Miss Watson’s escaped slave) have, unfortunately, fallen in with, the group stops in a rough-and-tumble town. There a drunken vagabond randomly insults one of the townspeople, and the insulted man simply and suddenly shoots the drunk dead. When the townspeople decide to take justice into their own hands and descend upon the home of the murderer, he emerges from his house, eyes the mob slowly, and issues a startlingly serious and eloquent speech. “The idea of you lynching anybody!” he begins. “It’s amusing.” He continues,

The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him. . . . The average man’s a coward. . . . Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do. So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark and fetch your masks. . . .

You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But . . . you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.9

An essential ingredient of courage emerges from this lengthy speech (much shortened here), which is given, ironically, by a cold-blooded murderer. He sees through the outward gall of the men who confront him and sees into their inner cowardice, a cowardice inherent in any mob. The false bravery of a mob doesn’t constitute courage because the nature of a mob is one that reduces risk for the individuals that form it. Their “courage” is “borrowed from their mass.” No risk means no difficulty. And no difficulty means no courage because, for an act to be truly courageous, it must entail a known risk or potential loss.10

I am writing this chapter, coincidentally, one day after a small mob—fifty members of the Ku Klux Klan—held a demonstration not an hour from my home. Wearing the exhausted robes and depleted sentiments of a barbaric past, the mob ranted and raved for forty-five minutes within the confines of a fenced-off area, under police protection, surrounded by a thousand counterprotesters and swarms of cameras and journalists. (Six weeks later, a larger mob returned, and by the time they were dispersed, one of them had driven his car into the crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring many others.)

In contrast to this scene of mob cowardice, two years before, a lone woman wearing climbing gear and a helmet scaled a thirty-foot flagpole at her state capitol and carried down the flag symbolizing the state’s racist past. Upon returning to the ground, the courageous Bree Newsome surrendered—willingly, head held high—to the authorities waiting to arrest her.

Courage exists only in relationship to something other than itself. Courage cannot “trust itself”11 but must refer to some outside, objective standard of goodness. A brave act must be for a noble end in order to constitute the virtue of courage. Aristotle says that “it is for the sake of what is noble that the courageous person stands his ground.”12 An act of daring committed for an ignoble purpose may be bold, but it’s not truly courageous. It may, in fact, be worse. Ambrose says that “fortitude without justice is the source of wickedness.”13 Such acts cannot be considered virtuous and therefore are not acts of courage. Courage must always be connected to a just end.

COURAGE ALLIED TO JUSTICE

The shenanigans of the imposter Duke and King, the two con men that take up with Huck and Jim on the river, prove the wisdom of the ancients in linking courage to justice. The imposters display ample boldness as they pretend to be European royalty, Shakespearean actors, and long-lost heirs to a recently executed will. But gall is not the same as courage. Men who swindle, cheat, and steal their way through life, no matter how brazenly, are far from virtuous, and therefore do not have virtuous courage. Their absurd and immoral antics show perfectly how chutzpah unconnected to justice results only in evil: in this case, the sale of Jim back into captivity.

Because courage is always connected to justice, and because justice is judged by reason, philosophers refer to courage as “a work of reason.”14 Reason is part of knowing what constitutes the good. Taking a risk isn’t virtuous if done merely out of inclination without intending some good. Not only is the ability to reason necessary in establishing what is just, but it is also the faculty that produces fear in a dangerous situation. Reason recognizes and acknowledges risk. To ignore or overlook potential harm is unreasonable, mere recklessness or foolishness. This is why courage, as the famous aphorism says, does not mean an absence of fear. In fact, if courage entails facing difficulties well, then the presence of fear adds to the difficulty. As Starbuck in Moby-Dick tells his ship’s crew, “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.”15

Thus not all boldness can be counted as the virtue of courage. A toddler who plunges into traffic after a wayward ball, unaware of the danger, isn’t displaying courage. But the man who gasps and races into the street to push the child away from an oncoming vehicle is. Fear comes from the awareness of a vulnerability or potential loss. Aristotle puts it this way: “So the courageous person is the one who endures and fears—and likewise is confident about—the right things, for the right reason, in the right way, and at the right time; for the courageous person feels and acts in accordance with the merits of the case, and as reason requires.”16 One must be vulnerable to suffering some kind of injury in order to be considered courageous.17 If facing difficulty were the only thing required of courage, then all a would-be hero would have to do is create obstacles to overcome, and voilà!—courage would be born. This is exactly what the lovable but foolish Tom Sawyer does in “helping” Huck release the captive Jim.

Freeing Jim from the cabin where he is imprisoned certainly requires risk on the part of the two boys. But rather than minimize the risk, Tom, his head full of ludicrous tales from his steady diet of pulp fiction, does all he can to increase it, thereby to increase the sense of adventure. When Huck proposes slipping off with the keys to unlock Jim after everyone in the house has gone to sleep, Tom protests that while that plan would work, “it’s too blame’ simple; there ain’t nothing to it. What’s the good of a plan that ain’t no more trouble than that?” Instead Tom proposes a plan that would, Huck says, “make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.”18 Tom’s plan involves the staples of the most sensational stories a boy might read: saws, trenches, rope ladders, notes written in blood, and flowers watered with tears. “You got to invent all the difficulties,” Tom explains.19 Such comedy is what makes the tales of Huck and Tom delightful and entertaining, as well as instructive.

Lest it create other and future dangers, courage must confront evil with moderation, “restraining fear and moderating acts of daring.”20 Moderation is exactly what Tom lacks. The necessity of moderation for true courage is borne out by the story. While the boys do manage, barely, to free Jim and run away from his captor, Tom’s romantic insistence on increasing the level of adventure—and therefore the risk—brings its natural consequences when Tom is shot in the leg during their escape. Courage can be excellent only as it is “‘informed’ by prudence.”21 The truly courageous person “does not suffer injury for its own sake.”22 Courage “has nothing to do with a purely vital, blind, exuberant daredevil spirit.” The person “who recklessly and indiscriminately courts any kind of danger is not for that reason brave; all he proves is that . . . he considers all manner of things more valuable than the personal intactness he risks for their sake.”23

It all ends well for Huck, Jim, and Tom, despite Tom’s bravado, which turns out to be—like the Duke and King’s staging of Shakespeare—merely bad acting. Only after risking his friends’ lives as well as his own does Tom finally admit what he has known all along: Jim has been a free man all this time. Miss Watson, who had died two months before, set him free in her will.

However, before all this is revealed, things are well on their way to going wrong. And in the midst of the near disaster, Jim shows himself to be the most courageous character in the book, facing difficulty well, with both prudence and moderation in pursuit of the good.

THE COURAGE OF THE RUNAWAY SLAVE

Jim’s kindness and loyalty to Huck are on display from the story’s beginning, even when so much is at stake for Jim as he seeks freedom for the sake of his family. Jim exhibits the virtue of courage throughout, but the fortitude he shows at the end of the story illustrates particularly well one of the essential qualities of courage: endurance.

Some readers interpret Jim’s passivity through most of the story as the portrayal of a stereotypical “Uncle Tom.” He endures the corrupt Duke and Dauphin, who commandeer the raft and put both Huck and Jim in harm’s way. He submits to Tom’s quixotic plans for his escape. Of course, Jim doesn’t have much other choice in these situations. So he endures. Such endurance is necessary for courage: “Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely a vigorous grasping and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.”24

But upon Tom’s being shot during Jim’s escape, Jim emerges out of hiding in order to save him—believing that this will surely mean giving up his freedom. Recognizing the risk and facing it for a greater good—a boy’s life rather than his own freedom—Jim embodies the virtue of courage. The character who has the least power in the book (a runaway slave had even less authority than a poor, runaway child) exercises more power than any other character in the story. And more courage.

Jim’s courage is rooted in both reason and conscience. Reason can lead to the wrong decision in one of two ways. Our reason can be flawed, leading us to think we are choosing rightly. But we can also know what the right thing to do is and choose wrong anyway.

Deciding whether one is acting rightly or wrongly is the domain of conscience. Conscience (which literally means “with knowledge”) is the application of knowledge or reason.25 There are two elements of conscience, one that acts as guide toward right conduct, the other that judges the action undertaken.26 In this way, conscience is similar to prudence. Based on reason and a well-developed conscience, Jim chooses rightly and courageously.

Sometimes, from lack of knowledge or experience or from faulty teaching, what is right or wrong in a given situation is difficult to discern. This is clearly the situation Huck is in. It’s what makes Huck an unreliable narrator (and it is, of course, the means of Twain’s comedic and satiric approach). The entire story of Huckleberry Finn centers on the difficulty Huck faces in resolving to do, and then carry out, the right thing in helping his friend Jim to freedom.

COURAGE AND THE MALFORMED CONSCIENCE

The problem for Huck—and all of us—is that his conscience is not an entirely reliable guide. In fact, one main target of Twain’s satire in the novel is the conscience that is malformed by a corrupt culture. Huck harbors distorted views of right and wrong, ones imparted to him by his flawed society. The progress he undergoes that corrects the wrong lessons his culture has taught him is the essence of Huckleberry Finn. We see his deformed conscience at work throughout the novel, as well as Huck’s struggle to reform it. Taught that slavery is good, Huck’s conscience reasons from this starting point and ends up in all the wrong places.

Huck’s sense of right and wrong is so distorted that he can’t even understand why Jim himself would want to be free. Huck is baffled that such a good fellow like Jim would want to do something so “wrong” as run away from his “rightful” owner. Huck has been raised in a society that taught him that slaves are not human, slavery is good, slaves are the property of their owners, and depriving someone of property is wrong.

Huck, like many in the antebellum South, developed a conscience with a distorted sense of right and wrong. In Introducing Moral Theology, William Mattison uses slavery as an example to show how the conscience can be malformed by social norms such that a slaveholder in eighteenth-century America could “genuinely” believe “in his heart of hearts” that owning slaves was “a virtuous act.”27 Mattison explains, “One can follow one’s conscience, and in doing so honestly think in one’s heart of hearts one is acting well, and yet be acting wrongly,” as in the case of the “erroneous conscience” of the slaveholder.28 Such thinking demonstrates the seared conscience the Bible talks about in 1 Timothy 4:1–2, a conscience rendered insensitive by abandoning scriptural teaching for too long. Both individuals and societies can abandon biblical principles. When society does, then it plays a significant role in searing the consciences of individuals within it with unscriptural teachings and false values. Every society has its own blind spots, of course. It is possible, as we see in Huck’s case and in many others throughout history, to veil with human customs and morality what God has established in human nature and natural law. To expose the lies that hide the moral truth revealed by nature and the God of nature requires effort, trauma, or some sudden epiphany. Or a great novelist.

When Huck decides to help Jim escape, he does so believing it is “wrong” to do so. He tells Tom, “I know what you’ll say. You’ll say it’s dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? I’m low down; and I’m a-going to steal him, and I want you keep mum and not let on. Will you?”29 When Tom agrees to help him, Huck says that Tom, like Jim, “fell considerable in my estimation.” He goes on:

Here was a boy that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn’t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save himself.30

Huck struggles to reconcile Jim’s humanity with the false teaching of his society. When he hears Jim express love and longing for his family, Huck doesn’t know what to make of it. “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n,” he marvels. Then he concludes, “It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.”31 Huck listens to Jim’s plans, once he’s freed, to save money in order to buy the freedom of his wife and children—or steal them away. Because his moral view is upside down, Huck is horrified. “It most froze me to hear such talk,” he says. Jim is “lowered” in Huck’s eyes, and Huck feels guilty for assisting in such a crime. “My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever,” Huck says as he is rowing Jim to freedom, “until at last I says to it, ‘Let up on me—it ain’t too late yet—I’ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.’” His malformed conscience is eased by his decision: “I felt easy and happy and light as a feather right off. All my troubles was gone.”32

Moral philosophers explain that the ignorance that can misinform one’s conscience is of two kinds: vincible and invincible. Vincible ignorance is avoidable if one is duly attentive. Invincible ignorance occurs when a person could not have known better. The difference in the two is in acting in good faith or not.33 These two kinds of ignorance illuminate the fact that it is possible to do “things we sincerely think are good, but which actually corrupt us, others, and society as a whole.”34

Huck’s is an invincible ignorance. He is, after all, a child and therefore lacks much moral culpability. Not only that, but he is a child who has been taught by his society and those in authority over him that slavery is right. Yet despite the malformation of his conscience, the law of God is written on his heart, and that law grapples throughout the story with the false ideas imparted to him by his society.

After two armed men come upon him and Jim on the raft, Huck instinctively lies to protect Jim. Afterward, believing he was wrong to do so, Huck becomes exasperated. Lacking a coherent moral apparatus that can explain why his conscience bothers him so, Huck settles for a pragmatic ethics:

I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.35

But Huck’s conscience is more developed than he realizes, and he continues to wrestle with it as he tries to convince himself to do the “right” thing by returning Jim to his owner, Miss Watson. Huck’s wavering back and forth between what his society has taught him is right and what his godly conscience tells him is wrong forms a considerable part of the narrative.

Finally, he thinks back to the lessons on prayer that Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas taught him. He remembers that prayer has never worked for him but thinks that perhaps if he does the “right” thing by writing the letter that reveals Jim’s whereabouts, God will hear and answer his prayers. As soon as he writes the letter, Huck says, “I knowed I could pray now.”36

But before he begins to pray, Huck’s mind is flooded with memories of his and Jim’s time together on the river, of Jim’s kindness and care for him, and of how Jim called him the best friend he’d ever had. Then, Huck looks at the letter: “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.” Upon condemning himself to hell, Huck reflects on the seriousness of his decision, which only deepens his commitment to it.

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.37

Huck is mistaken in his belief that he will go to hell for helping Jim escape, of course, but he does not know that. He faces (he thinks) the greatest danger a person will ever face—eternal damnation of the soul—and chooses the well-being of another over his own. When Huck hears the call of God’s law on his heart, he mistakes it, ironically, for temptation to do wrong. His decision to help Jim run away is not, in his mind, an act of nobility directed toward justice. But this is the great irony of Twain’s satire: we know that it is. And despite Huck’s erroneous belief that his intention is unjust, Huck shows courage in his willingness to sacrifice his very soul to obtain Jim’s freedom.

Knowingly facing risk or danger is necessary for an act to be courageous.38 Based on the knowledge Huck has (false though it may be), Huck’s decision is courageous. His courage is echoed by the real-life words written many years later by a real-life martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it. . . . Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.”39

In our highly individualistic age, we think of things like conscience and courage in mainly individual terms. In its individualism and its experientialism, Huck’s brand of courage is that particularly modern kind described by Charles Taylor as the “quest for authenticity.”40 Huck’s courage is in overcoming a malformed conscience in order to do what reason and nature confirm is transcendentally and eternally good and right.

But the cultivation and expression of virtue (and vice) and the formation of conscience is not merely an individual act but also a communal one. In addition to shaping individual experience and character, great literature has a role in forming the communal conscience and public virtue. We can understand a great deal about a culture—its strengths, its weaknesses, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature that it not only produces but reveres.

Huck’s transformation from ne’er-do-well into a boy whose developing fortitude drives him to stand against a great wrong supported by his society has made Huck Finn one of the most paradigmatic characters in all of American literature. In The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, Azar Nafisi says American individualism “at its best” is exemplified in Huck’s “quiet and unobtrusive moral strength.”41

Moral strength is one kind of courage. Perhaps it’s the foundation of all courage.