The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel of a boy's initiation into manhood. Huck's journey down the Mississippi River with Jim is the "rite of passage" through which he experiences the multifaceted life, goes through painful transitions, gains self-knowledge, finds his own identity, and develops into a more mature individual. In this growth process, he also learns about the society's values and develops a set of his own values. Huck's existence on the raft and off the shore gives him the opportunity to experience a life that is drastically different from the one lived by the common people in the society.

Through Huck's eyes, the "shore" values, represented by the common values of the ante-bellum (period before the American Civil War) society in the South, are being sharply criticized in this novel. The society is filled with people who are cruel, unsympathetic, cold, selfish, pretentious, hypocritical, and...