Huck Finn in the novel by Mark Twain is an innocent set against a cynical and hypocritical world. Huck changes in the course of the novel, but he retains a degree of innocence that eludes other characters. The course of his development reflects the stages of growth undergone by all people, from childhood through loss of innocence to a search for identity, but Huck still retains a certain innocence that set him apart and that in itself becomes his identity by the end of the novel.
Huck begins as a young man living a new life as a result of his adventures with Tom Sawyer in Tom Sawyer. His earlier life as a free soul is his childhood, and yet he has retained much of that childhood even as he finds himself up against the formal education he has always avoided. He retains his child-like view of the world even in the face of his drunken Pap, who kidnaps the boy and subjects him to the effects acute alcoholism has on the old man.
Huck's escape down the river is the beginning of his loss of innocence, for it is along the river where he encounters different people whose hypocrisy, greed, and stands in sharp contrast to the innate goodness of the boy. Huck may lack formal moral training, something he knows as he is faced with the religion society tries to impose on him, but his own moral concepts are more realistic and more meaningful to him than the formal morality the rest of society professes to accept and then manages to break. Huck sees the evil nature of men like the Duke and the Dauphin, but he is also able to see the hypocrisy of the Grangerfords, Sherbourne, and others who live by a false moral code that is destructive rather than constructive. Huck also learns the true humanity of Jim, something he would not have been able to realize had he been fully incorporated into the society of his day.
The realization that much of the world is not the fine and moral place others have always told him it was is the first ste...