Mark Twain

From the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the speaker is illustrating a great deal about his character. Mark Twain doesn't waste any time, and shows Huck's rebellious side from the very first chapter. It's written like a child would tell it, with the very first mentions of Widow Douglas already bringing up whatever is on Huck's mind about her. Before he even explains the situation of living with her, he's already criticizing their way of life and going on about what he decided to do about it.

In the next page and a half, he tells several short stories and incidents that sum up everything the reader needs to know about her (which is not very much), but does it in a real, adolescent-sounding style of speech. Huck rambles on and on, and rarely does talk about something with saying his opinion on it by the end of the sentence. "Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there." The same thing happens again right after: "She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm." For Huck, that's all there is to it. Whatever other people do to and around him, his mind is always on his own opinion, and he never hesitates to say or announce whatever wild thought is in his head.

By making him both a dissident speaker and giving him such a realistic child thought process, Twain made Huck easy to connect to and rationalize with. Despite all the unusual situations he, Jim, and eventually Tom get in to, the ideas running through Huck's mind are easy to follow along with. Of course plenty of people disagreed with those ideas, but in the course of the book it's impossible to ignore them. Huck's thoughts are as much a part of the story as is the actual plot, so the two are rather inseparable. Twain couldn't have made an adult work in this role because the issues Huck faces were too serious and would be too straining to read about. By making him (in some ways) a naive little kid, and in some ways a confused, mature mind, it gives him a distinct role in the novel.