Completely innocent characters in fiction are often used by writers as a way of creating an ironic comment on the society in which they live, a society the innocent may not understand but which he or she can still convey to the reader by contrast, understatement, and an ironic counterpoint. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain depicts what could be called "The Education of Huck Finn" as the young man travels down the river and experiences different aspects of the society of his time. Huck is intuitive about what is right, and in the long term what he learns is to trust his intuition, his own innate sense of right and wrong. Huck Finn is the innocent who serves to illuminate the hypocrisy and corruption of society through his pragmatic nature, his willingness to accept others until they show their true colors, and his innate sense of honor and fairness.
Huck from the beginning is a character who follows his own mind and who values the ability to do things rather than to know the book-learning valued by society. Huck does not learn the sort of thing found in books, and indeed Twain uses this novel as a way of making fun of a certain genre of books, the sort of high adventures that fascinate Tom Sawyer and that are very different from the real world in which Tom and Huck live. The education of Huck Finn is an education in the hypocrisy that besets so many different levels of society.
In the beginning of the novel, Huck is enmeshed in a very different sort of education under the tutelage of the widow Douglas. This is the more traditional education acquired in school, a type of education intended to civilize the boy:
I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever (Twain 38).
For Huck, education is only v...