I was powerful lazy and comfortable —didn't want to get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep sound of "boom!" away up the river. I rouses up, and rests on my elbow and listens; pretty soon I hears it again. I hopped up, and went and looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long ways up—about abreast the ferry. And there was the ferryboat full of people floating along down. I knowed what was the matter now […]You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my carcass come to the top.

Basic set-up:

Huck has just managed to escape his abusive alcoholic father by faking his own death and running away. He hides on Jackson's Island, in the Mississippi River, and here we see him waking up the morning after his escape.

Huck Finn is adventurous, he's gutsy, and he's smart—but he's also just your regular teenager. Mark Twain is writing about a boy who isn't some special somebody. We mean, yeah, of course he is special because he's so cool, but he's not a prince or an aristocrat or a trust fund baby or something.

Huck Finn comes from a poor background, and that's deliberate: Twain wants to show how good someone coming from the lower classes of society can be. This also reflects Realism's preoccupation with class, and especially with depicting characters who come from all sorts of different class backgrounds.

There was a lot of controversy around the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when it was first published in 1884. A lot of the controversy centered around the language of the novel. When you read the passage above, you probably noticed immediately how slangy and ungrammatical it is. For instance, Huck says, "I was dozing again when I thinks I hears a deep sound of 'boom!'" This isn't fancy or grammatically correct: it's Huck's spoken language.

Mark Twain is giving us the language of everyday speech in this book—and specifically, it's the spoken language of a lower-class teenager. It's spoken language, it's simple language, and it may not always be grammatically correct, but Twain is showing that this kind of language is poetic and beautiful in its own way.