Question

Why do you think Mark Twain uses a young boy as the main character and narrator of the novel? Your response should be at least two hundred words.

Answer 1

I think one of the main reasons Mark Twain used a young boy as the main character and narrator of such a controversial novel filled with adult themes to convey the innocent side of these adult themes. Telling this story in the eyes of a teenage boy, the morality of these situations appears more obvious. Another reason why Mark Twain used a teenage boy as the main character and narrator in the novel is because it allows Twain to imply a comparison between the powerlessness and the vulnerability of a child and the powerlessness and vulnerability of a black man in the pre-Civil War era. He also may be using a child protagonist to dramatize the conflicts between societal and received morality on one hand and a different kind of morality based on experience and intuition.