Fibs, Lies, and Rotten Lies

I've just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time in a dozen years or so, and I find that the lies in the novel come in various forms. There may be one or two others, but I will call the three primary types of lies Confabulist, Survivalist, and Criminal.

1. Confabulist
Tom Sawyer is the greatest confabulist of the novel, constantly making up outrageous stories for no reason other than entertainment. Tom steals copiously from the adventure stories he reads, and sustains a nearly quixotic adherence to them. The simple and true are no fun for Tom, and he insists on ridiculous complications to every scenario. His plot to help Jim escape captivity, furthermore, is an elaborate game that only he knows is completely unnecessary. Though Tom is thrilled that real, dangerous events have happened as a result of his imaginary schemes, I see his bullet wound as a punishment for his antics.

2. Survivalist
Huckleberry Finn, and to a lesser extent Jim, lies for survival. Nearly all of Huck's own lies keep him from trouble and Jim from capture, and for the most part hurt no one else. He constantly invents new names and ailing families for himself, but unlike Tom, Huck is not an especially good liar and has trouble keeping his story straight if the lie is not extremely simple. Huck's brief forays into other types of lies get him into big trouble; his prank on Jim after they are lost in a fog (an attempt at confabulation?) results in more remorse by Huck than almost any other action in the book:
     "It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. . . . I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way."
Still, Huck doesn't generally consider his types of lies bad, but rather akin to "borrowing" food along the river. He doesn't mean any harm in them, and only lies when necessary.

3. Criminal
The King and Duke are the worst kind of liars in the novel, because they use all sorts of trickery, lies, and deceit to cheat others (mostly the poor) of their money. Huck goes along with their schemes to avoid trouble, as long as they are only cheating people out of a little bit of money, but when they plan to cheat a large sum from an innocent family, he takes action against them. When Jim and Huck imagine the two men coming up with even worse schemes, they "made up [thei]r minds they was going to break into somebody's house or store, or was going into the counterfeit-money business, or something." It seems that the only thing worse, for Huck, than stealing and cheating, is to fabricate money itself. The faux royalty's deceitful acts get the better of them eventually, and they leave the novel tarred and feathered.

I could say much more on this subject, but the treatise is getting a bit long already. I'm sure that Huckleberry Finn's complicated morality has been the subject of hundreds of pages of scholarship already, and I imagine that there is still much more to say.