Brendan, 

   I think you have understood most of what Twain meant in the "deformed conscience
   and sound heart" quotation.  But there is one aspect of what you say in  
   your opening paragraph that is not quite right.  I think Twain meant that living 
   in the 19th century South and being exposed to all of the influences from his 
   upbringing (both from Pap and from the Widow Douglas) had *deformed" Huck's
   conscience in some important ways.  The growth he undergoes in the story amounts
   to Huck's sound heart overcoming that deformation.  You could say that is a 
   sort of "counter-deformation," but I don't think that is what Twain was referring
   to with the word "deformation."  For him the "deformation" was the influence of 
   Huck's upbringing, and specifically the idea that whites could own black slaves
   as property (together with all the implications of that point of view).       

   I don't agree that the King and the Duke were that crucial in forming Huck's 
   sense of right and wrong about stealing.  This has come up long before Huck
   runs into them and you can see that Huck's understanding of this is pretty 
   subtle even early in the story in Chapter 12 (p. 49).  Huck already sees how
   Pap's ideas about how it is permissible to "borrow" things and the Widow Douglas's 
   sterner point of view about stealing are contradictory.  That shows that, even among 
   the big influences on Huck's conscience, there is some disagreement and "deformation" 
   (I'm referring to Pap's self-serving rationalization of his stealing).  That is 
   especially ironic because the basic conflict Huck has comes from the fact that 
   everything he has been taught by society (especially the Widow Douglas) about the 
   relation between blacks and whites is predicated on the idea that white people can own 
   slaves as property.  So when Huck helps Jim, from that point of view he is stealing 
   and he "knows" stealing is wrong (at least in theory!)

   Your essay does a pretty good job of tracing how Huck's attitudes about Jim change.  
   But there is another aspect of the "deformed conscience/sound heart" contrast that
   it would have been good to examine in more detail.  I'm thinking of a series of 
   passages where Huck talks about how he has to overcome his "conscience" to do something 
   his heart knows is right.  It would have been good, for instance, to look in detail at
   passages like the one on page 66 where Huck is examinining his own motives to try to 
   understand why he feels that what he is doing with Jim is wrong.  You might have 
   used what he said in that conversation with himself to illustrate exactly how the 
   "deformation" arose from Huck's life with the Widow Douglas and how the pangs of 
   conscience he feels are exactly like what we expect from a person having a moral 
   quandary.  The real pain he feels at these moments is what makes them so powerful: 
   He feels genuinely bad for making what we know is the right choice because he thinks 
   it is the wrong choice, based on his upbringing.  It would have been good to show 
   more of exactly how that plays out rather than just describing this in general terms.  
   It's interesting that in fact in almost every (maybe every?) time Huck uses the word 
   "conscience," Twain is showing a new step in this development, so 
   you might have traced that progression in more detail. 

   Because of the way you had to write the paper, I think the structure is rather 
   "episodic" -- it reads like a bunch of thoughts added on one after the other 
   rather than a really coherent argument.  But I'm trying not to be too picky.
   There are also quite a few spelling mistakes (marked on the paper).  I know it
   is probably difficult to do this if you are used to having a spell-checker, though. 

   Content/Evidence -- B

   Structure/Mechanics -- B