Jim's freedom simply depends upon his reaching the northern states. Huck's freedom, however, is not so easy to achieve. It depends upon his reaching a new state of mind - a realization that slavery and prejudice and many of the other practices and beliefs of his culture are wrong. By the end of the novel, it is doubtful that Huck has truly undergone such an ideological shift. His decision to go to Hell indicates that he still thinks it is sinful to help a runaway slave. The institution of chattel slavery is not seen by Huck as immoral; he sees himself as immoral for going against it. It is important to pay attention to Huck's actual words: "And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again" (Twain 214). His choice of the word "steal" is telling. It shows that he retains the ingrained notion that a human being can be property. Huck has not adopted a new set of rules or beliefs; he is still playing by the old ones - breaking them, yes, but not discarding them. This is not to say that Huck has learned nothing. He is acting with the conviction that he will go to Hell for his crime, which means that he is willing to sacrifice his own fate for Jim's. He can only do this if he accepts the black man's life and soul as equal to his own. Of course, Huck never views his own soul as being worth very much. This is another cultural message of which he never quite frees himself. In the final paragraph of the book, Huck finally seems to reject the "sivilized" society in which he has been raised when he decides to "light out for the Territory" (Twain 293). The irony, however, is that, even if a person escapes the physical boundaries of his society, he still carries its psychological baggage with him. Twain's dark suggestion is that Huck will never truly be free because, wherever he goes, those cultural messages and values will always be with him. Escape and freedom from this inner tyranny are illusions. To paraphrase an old adage, "No matter where you try to run from yourself, there you are." Even the geographic movement of the story underscores this point. Huck and Jim are trying to reach freedom, but, ironically, end up traveling down the river - toward slavery.