Michael, 

     The first page and a third of your essay seemed like the beginning of a good response to
   the first prompt (about Twain's formulation of the "deformed conscience and sound heart"
   that he wanted to present the character of Huckleberry Finn).  But then, starting about a 
   third of the way into the second page, it seemed as though you switched topics to the second
   prompt.  I say this because at that point you start to discuss how the final chapters 
   relate to the moral climax of the story in Chapter 31.  Did you misunderstand the assignment? 
   I was asking you to choose one of those topics and you did not need to address both of them.  
   Or did you perhaps think you didn't have enough to say about the first topic?  The unfortunate
   feature of the way you did things is that I don't think you really did either one of the 
   topics full justice.  

     For the first one, though, you were definitely on the right track looking at Chapter 16.  
   There are a few other passages too 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 the passage on page 66 where Huck is examining his conscience to try to understand why 
   it is telling him 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 it 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 exactly how that plays out and there's enough there to get several pages if 
   you analyze the speech on page 66 closely line by line.  Along the same lines, 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.  

     Your discussion of whether Chapters 32 - 40 form a satisfying conclusion to the story
   focuses mostly on Huck's role in them.  But the thing that makes those chapters such a 
   departure from the earlier part of the story is the appearance of Tom Sawyer and the way Tom
   more or less hijacks the story by setting the tone for the attempts to break Jim out
   of imprisonment.  For that topic, a good focus would be how far apart Huck and Tom have 
   grown by that stage of the story.  You mention this to an extent but you don't go into 
   enough detail.  For instance, you could say Tom hasn't had the experiences of the raft
   trip, so his actions are really still play-acting and childish games.  Huck, on the 
   other hand, has grown up much more than Tom by this point, so while he goes along
   with Tom, he can see how ridiculous some of Tom's schemes really are.    

     Your writing is generally very good, but there are a few slips that I think are mostly
   lapses in proof-reading ("shoot" instead of "shot," "it's" instead of "its," some stray
   commas, etc. all on page 2).

   Content/Evidence -- B

   Structure/Mechanics -- A-