Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deals with the issue of collective consciousness, and Huck's digression from collective consciousness, on many levels. Collective consciousness can be seen as any form of knowledge or behavior that is accepted by a large number of people. In Huck Finn collective consciousness is discussed in the form of religion, mob violence, con artistry, and Southern society. In all of these scenarios collective consciousness has some form of negative effect deriving from the fact that for collective consciousness to work the problem at hand must be universalized and thus oversimplified, distancing the people who subscribe to the collective consciousness from the particulars (and moral specifics) of the problem. Through this process judgment is clouded and morality is skewed. Mark Twain is trying to emphasize that every situation must be interpreted conditionally, and not universally through collective consciousness, and Huck has trouble coming to terms with the collective consciousness of society because society does not accept his individual circumstance.
The first example of collective consciousness that Huck comes in contact with (besides Southern society as a whole, of course) is religion in the form of Christianity that the Widow and Miss Watson teach him. In this case religion is a collective consciousness because it represents standardized morals, teachings, and judgments, and even though Christianity takes many forms, it is still a collective consciousness because it is a belief system that is shared, spread, and unconditionally accepted by certain people. Religion is introduced to Huck as a moral code and as a judgment system, but he recognizes (somewhat unknowingly) that the collective consciousness of religion oversimplified things and does not necessarily fit (in the concrete terms he learned about morality) to the situation in which he is placed.
