Yet Twain could have achieved some similar effects through the use of dialect in dialogue while retaining the third-person, omniscient narrator of Tom Sawyer. This raises the question of Twain's motive for making Huck the narrator. The primary difference is that the new approach allows unfettered access to Huck's thoughts. This leads to the conclusion that it was Huck's reflections on events and the persistent revelation of his motivations and emotions that Twain was concerned with. The second effect of the decision about narrative voice is that no 'sivilized' voice, as Huck would say, intervenes between the narrator and his audience. This makes it clear that Huck must possess a sensibility worth attending to and a voice capable of holding an audience--in spite of the fact that he rejects the confinement of good society and, ostensibly, rejects the refinement of morals and voice that society offers.
Huck will, therefore, confound any expectations about his sensibility or his artistic power that are based on a prejudiced view of his relationship to polite society. Both his narrative talent and moral sense are established in the opening paragraph where Huck shows himself to be a judge in both literary and moral matters. Just as he distinguishes the relative veracity of his narrative from that of Twain's he also candidly includes himself among those who have lied at some time while carefully distinguishing those who might never have lied--Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas. He thus separates himself from the morally upright female forces of civilization while simultaneously (and naively) demonstrating that they have influenced him sufficiently to make him aware of the importance of moral distinctions.
As in any episodic narrative in which a young protagonist acquires experience and knowledge the novel offers a variety of incidents that point up, each in its own fashion, some of the social hypocrisies and personal err...