Huckleberry Finn, narrator and main character in the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is easily one of America's best-loved fictional characters. As our guide on a journey through both the slumps of humanity and our own conscience, he is undoubtedly wise beyond his years. In fact it is his lack of age that renders him so wise. Through youthful ignorance he is able to escape the curse of stupidity and prejudice, something given to mostly everybody from that era by society itself. Huck is every American's inner child. .
Huck has practically no sense of humor; in fact he is almost completely literal mind. This is shown time and time again when he fails to see the wit in many of his co-characters" jokes. For example he does not even admit a chuckle when told the age-old joke about where Moses was when the lights went out ( in the dark!). Also this gullibility leads him to believe that it is impossible for the drunk in the circus to be, in reality, a highly trained acrobat and part of a scheme to fool the audience. But this characteristic is not necessarily a negative one. It makes him the ideal narrator for the story, because he is so literal minded he rarely exaggerates or embellishes the story so we can rest assure that we the reader are getting nothing but facts. .
As expected by some one who lives in the frontier of a growing America, Huck is extremely practical, adaptable and shrewd. He is so adaptable that he can go from living in the civilized Christian home of Widow Douglas to being surrounded by wilderness, drifting down the Mississippi River, then back to the "elegance" of the Grangerfords. Huck is basically a human chameleon. As for his shrewdness, his resourceful imagination helps get him out of even the stickiest of situations. For example, when he is able to save Jim from the bounty hunters by creating the story about that Jim is really his father who is sick with a contagious disease.
