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  Throughout classic stories such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain shows himself to be a master of dramatic irony -- a literary device in which a character or group of characters act in ignorance of something already known to the reader. Through his use of dramatic irony, Twain is able to make some very shrewd commentaries on topics as diverse as racism and religion. He does this through the voices of such youthful protagonists as Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer, who report on the events going on around them very matter-of-factly without even understanding their significance.

Huck Finn, because his mother is dead and his father is an abusive drunk, has not shared the normal social experiences of most middle-class people in the nineteenth century, and thus is out of the social mainstream. But this has also made him more free to become an individual thinker -- and it has given him the courage to act on his convictions. We see this most clearly in contrasting him with Tom Sawyer in this novel. At the beginning of the novel, Huck and Tom are playing at becoming robbers; they make elaborate plans, but never actually rob anyone, much less kill them. It is totally play. For the most part Tom’s adventures are play-acting, a form of boyish rebellion against his Aunt Polly. Tom will, however, outgrow this stage and grow up to be a respectable Southern gentleman. Huck will not, because he has not had the firm grounding in socialization that Tom has had.

In each of Twain's more famous novels, the author establishes a protagonist (or a pair of protagonists) who are not yet wise to 'the ways of the world.' Nonetheless, their narrative voices comment freely upon that world, and Twain allows us to read through their commentaries to see the real situations that lie beneath. In so doing, he actually creates a sort of poignant irony that emphasizes the protagonists’ innocence against the backdrop of a world they will soon grow up to inhabit.