Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/Awesome
- 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.
- There comes a point at which a pair of treacherous traveling companions have turned in the escaped slave 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. At least that way he'd be back with his family. On the one hand, the prevailing social order of the antebellum American South says that this is nothing more or less than what is ordained by God, as is every other aspect of the 'peculiar institution'; in this formulation, Huck's aid in Jim's escape - legally, stealing him - is a grave and possibly mortal sin, and aiding in his recapture serves as expiation. On the other hand, Huck and Jim have been through a lot together; no matter how hard Huck tries, he can't seem to think of Jim as anything else but his best and closest friend, and how they've stood by each other through it all. Then his eye falls on the letter he's just written. Huck's decision:
- Fred Clark, at Slacktivist, has called that "the greatest scene of salvation and redemption in literature".