Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1884)
“The most controversial masterpiece in American literature — a runaway boy and an escaped slave rafting down the Mississippi, asking whether conscience can overrule the law.”
Characters in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain · 1884 · 7 characters analyzed
Cast: Huck Finn, Jim, Tom Sawyer, Pap Finn, The King, The Duke, Widow Douglas.
Character Analysis
The son of the town drunk, raised by no one in particular, with no socialized conscience that can override what he actually feels. Huck's moral genius is his inability to think abstractly — he can't separate 'Jim' into 'a slave' and reason about categories. He sees the person. This disability, by the standards of his society, makes him the novel's moral hero. His narration — in Missouri dialect, without retrospective wisdom — means we get his moral growth in real time, unvarnished.
Missouri vernacular — double negatives ('I warn't never sorry'), non-standard verb agreement ('they was'), comma splices, informal vocabulary. No attempt to speak correctly, even in formal situations.