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Uh, Clem, loved literaturists. His young lady who composed obits was it :)
The moral center of the novel, of course, is Huck's decision that sacrificing his friend Jim's freedom to ensure his own eternal salvation isn't a choice he can make. "All right then, I'll GO to hell" may be one of the most powerful lines in all of literature.
So when Sawyer arrives and treats Jim's imprisonment as a further episode of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the novel seems to get all soft in the center. In this essay, Nick Gillespie opines that far from ruining his greatest novel with Sawyer's fatuous nonsense, Twain "reveals in ugly detail the limitations of [the archetypal prankish American] adolescent mentality when confronting the reality of American race relations."
I reread Huckleberry Finn again this past summer; due to Gillespie, I may have to do it all over again, for which I can only say, "thanks."