The following excerpts are from the critical essay, "Huckleberry Finn as American Epic" by Aaron Urbanczyk (Southern Catholic College), in the Ignatius Critical Editions: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (pp. 379-93):
Huck Finn clearly evokes a "cosmic" world view. The tension over slavery and race permeates virtually every aspect of the novel and provides the epic dimension to Huck's journey down the Mississippi. Indeed, the dispute over slavery was merely symptomatic of the broader questions of American identity confronting the Union during Twain's lifetime (that is, 
in a democracy, what is the nature of freedom, citizenship, human dignity, political participation, equality between races, etc.?). Such questions are certainly epic in scope. While one can cite many examples of slavery's impact upon American culture in Huck Finn, two will serve to demonstrate the vast cultural and social tensions in the early nineteenth century: the attitudes of Pap and Silas Phelps regarding race and slavery. Pap's splenetic tirade in chapter 6, uttered in a drunken rage in the cabin where Pap has imprisoned Huck, captures America's divided mind in the decades preceding the Civil War. The object of Pap's contempt seems all of society itself, including the government, the free market, educational institutions, and even the right to vote, all on account of the emerging reality of black men and women becoming freed from slavery and entering civil society. He is outraged because a black man of mixed blood is more educated, wealthier, and more capable of exercising his voting rights than Pap himself. ...
The main character of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are complex individuals traversing an epic terrain that is both ethical and theological in significance. Even though Huck and Jim are caught within their era's cultural quandaries, they themselves are not political, social, or religious crusaders but individuals struggling to resolve their own problems. As brilliantly crafted by Twain, neither Jim's nor Huck's character is a thin symbolic representation of an abstract social, political, or moral ideal. They are not abolitionists out to change the hearts and minds of America regarding the issue of slavery. Rather, like all great epic heroes, Huck is a psychologically realistic character, and as such embarks upon an epic journey that runs along two concurrent registers: ethical and theological. His moral sensibilities and his theological bearings become radically altered as he struggles with his decision to abet a fugitive slave who willfully abandoned his master. In fact, the effect of the journey upon his own soul threaten to destabilize the moral and theological structure of the universe as he (and his nation) know it.
If Huck Finn can be called an American Odyssey, the journey begins at the ethical level for Huck. At a superficial level, Huck exhibits the typical American pragmatism toward morality: moral ideals are nice but not always practical in the face of real-world problems. For instance, Huck, in a moment of complex moral casuistry, explains the difference between "borrowing" and "stealing" something: "Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right" (see p. 77). Huck even expresses his frustration with matters of moral principle: "[I]t don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does, I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow" (see p. 258).
Yet Huck is hardly a boy without a conscience; his frustration comes from the fact that while he may not always act in the most ethical fashion, he has a very sensitive and developed conscience. Huck is a deeply empathetic boy who keenly feels the pain of those around him. He also has a sharp intuition for justice and injustice, so much that he cannot repress his mental and emotional reactions when he observes them in his immediate surroundings. ...
Huck's struggle does not simply involve the moral probity of one isolated act or set of acts (such as helping one black slave "illicitly" gain his freedom); his struggle represents a clash of two violently opposed world views and moral systems. The voice of Huck's conscience represents a particular social value code, certain dimensions of which are deeply racist and inhumane. This value code, which Huck has internalized, accepts chattel slavery as a perfectly permissible and profitable social institution. This code also dogmatically maintains the subhuman status of black men, women, and children as a natural God-given fact. In this view, they are moral creature only when considered as property, and when viewing Jim's situation from the perspective of property rights, Huck can see only that he is maliciously defrauding a generous old widow of what belongs to her.
Yet Huck becomes aware of a competing value code that asserts the opposite of the one in which he has been raised, and the clash of these two codes within his soul is truly epic. As Huck travels with Jim, he begins to see Jim as a person in his own right, possessing the dignity Huck was used to acknowledging only in other whites. For instance, in chapter 15, Huck humbles himself to Jim after cruelly trying to trick him into thinking their separation in the fog was only a dream; in chapter 16, Huck discovers the intense loyalty and devotion Jim has to his wife and children when he hears Jim relate how, once free, he will work to purchase their freedom; and in chapter 23, Huck empathizes with Jim's identity as a loving father who had wrongfully beaten his daughter for what Jim had perceived as disrespectful behavior. Jim emerges in Huck's mind as that which the voice of his conscience cannot accept: a dignified human being and a man worthy of empathy, respect, and admiration. The violent tension between these two value codes becomes clear in Huck's problematic affirmation of Jim's nobility and dignity in chapter 40, when Jim insists on getting a doctor to save Tom Sawyer's life because Tom would have done the same thing for him. Huck effusively proclaims, "I knowed [Jim] was white inside" (see p. 304), as a matter of genuine admiration; yet this affirmation is tragically racialized. Huck can still conceive of a "true" human being only as "white", even if only on the "inside". While Huck is shedding a world view containing racist and unjust elements for something more just and virtuous, his transformation is incomplete.
Yet the most cosmic and cataclysmic dimension of Huck's epic struggle pertains to the theological foundations of creation, specifically God's Providence regarding Heaven and Hell. The novel evokes Heaven and Hell purposefully, as their significance becomes inverted for Huck as a result of his transformation in value systems. The movement in Huck's soul from viewing Jim as mere property to appreciating him as a fellow human being is not only a seismic shift in Huck's ethical world view; it is also a traumatic revaluation of the significance of Heaven and Hell. Early in the novel, Huck is instructed on the significance of Heaven and Hell as eternal reward and punishment by the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. This education takes place in the context of the two ladies' attempt to "sivilize" Huck and is roundly comic. For example, according to Huck, Miss Watson describes Heaven as a place where one just "go[es] around all day long with a harp and sing[s], forever and ever", to which Huck responds, "I didn't think much of it" (see p. 7). The comedy is equally hilarious in Huck's reaction to her depiction of Hell: "Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular" (see p. 7). In this early episode, Heaven and Hell are mere abstractions for Huck (and fodder for Twain's irreverent wit); they have little practical relevance for his life. Yet the eternal dimensions of the cosmos become frighteningly real and terrifyingly inverted for Huck. Heaven and Hell will cease to be comic abstractions and will take on a deadly significance for his understanding of himself and his future.
More about this volume from IgnatiusCriticalEditions.com:
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, according to many critics and fond readers, the great American novel. Full of vibrant American characters, intriguing regional dialects and folkways, and down-home good humor, it also hits Americans in one of their greatest and on-going sore spots: the fraught issue of racism.
As Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi and encounter all manner of people and situations, and as Huck struggles mightily with his conscience concerning Jim, the novel strongly invites a moral and religious perspective. Mary R. Reichardt, the editor of this edition, is a professor of literature in the Catholic Studies department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN.
A look at the essays
"Camp meetings", or revivals, show up in Huck's adventures and in Twain's library. Fr. Anthony J. Berret, SJ, shows how this religious practice lends form to the narrative.
William F. Byrne shows how Huck Finn is not just un-Romantic, but anti-Romantic in "Huckleberry Finn as a Response to Romanticism", while John F. Devanney, Jr. navigates the troubled waters of morality in the tale: why Twain was afraid people would impose a moral on his work, and how critics have done so despite him.
In "Huck's Sound Heart", Thomas W. Stanford III investigates the conflicts of conscience that pervade the work. Aaron Urbanczyk offers "Huckleberry Finn as American Epic", the story of a young and unsettled boy in a young and unsettled country.
Mary Reichardt situates the reader with the introductory essay.
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