In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story of Jim, the slave who travels with Huck down the river, may derive some of its underlying reality from slave narratives, but the novel can by no means be considered a slave narrative itself. For one thing, Jim is not the main character, and indeed his sensibility is always filtered through that of Huck, who speaks in the first person and who observes Jim and other characters. In addition, the novel is more about the issue of how Huck comes to terms with the meaning of slavery from a white point of view, and Huck's innocence is an important aspect of both his personality and his learning experience with Jim.
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 is always the innocent, but he becomes more aware of the need to make direct choices as to what is right and what is wrong. He has always known intuitively what is right and what is wrong, but he is being exposed to greater and greater examples of what is wrong. The criminality and mean-spiritedness of the Duke and the Dauphin cause Huck to use his wiles to escape from them. The experience also lea...