Critics of Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry Finn, view the protagonist's proclamation "All right, then, I'll go to hell" in chapter 31 as the story's climax. Twain's novel lent itself to such radical interpretations because it was the first major American work to depart from traditional European novelistic structures. thus providing critics with an unfamiliar framework. The re- maining twelve chapters act as a counterpoint, commenting on, if not reversing, the first part in which a morality play receives greater confirma- tion. Huck’s journey down the Mississippi repre- sents a rite of passage, in which the character's personal notions of right and wrong come into constant conflict with his socially constructed conscience by the various people and situations the protagonist encounters. The novel's cyclical structure encourages crit- ics to see the novel's disparate parts as inter- linked; the novel begins and ends with the b...