The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means. . . . Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers” .
	Rand's characters are used as means to promote her own ends. Rand does her best to make the reader respect and appreciate Roark, because she knows that accepting him is to accept her philosophy. In fact, Howard Roark is not a man, he is a philosophy embodied . In short, she uses his humanity as a means to make us emotionally accept her philosophy. In opposition to her hero, Roark, Rand creates Ellsworth Toohey. He is less intelligent, less talented, and physically weaker than Roark. If that were not enough, Toohey is a master manipulator, and we are repeatedly shown how he uses others for his own ends. It is easy for the reader to choose which side he is on – whichever is opposed to a man like Toohey, which also happens to be Roark's side. In truth, Toohey's character is a masterful diversion. By making Toohey's manipulation explicit Rand hides the fact that she is being manipulative herself. Instead of real interactions, Rand sets up caricatures of people in order to emotionally connect us with her personal philosophy. By using Kant's ethical philosophy we are able to see what Rand is trying to do, and why this manipulation works. Instead of respecting humanity as an ends in itself, she is using it as a means.
	Another important moral philosophy is Levinas's concept of our moral obligation to respect the alterity, the Otherness, of those around us. He says the Other, whoever they may be, is, “someone for whom I am answerable” . In fact, it is only in respecting the Other that we truly become part of the human family. This idea is explicitly understood and explained in a literary context by Flannery O'Connor, who says, “a story is a dramatic event that involves a person because he is a person, and a particular person—that is, because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality.” We may be tempted to use these principles to judge how characters treat the Otherness of one another within a text, but I believe that we can more ably judge the literary value of a text by examining how the Otherness of the characters is treated by the author.
	 One text which deals powerfully with Otherness is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Finn was first published in 1884, some twenty years after the American Civil War. Twain seems to have realized that the Emancipation Proclamation may have granted blacks freedom from slavery, but that equality and respect have not accompanied that freedom. In 1884 most Americans still viewed blacks as different and inferior. 