The Child Narrator Technique in English and Uzbek Prose

This article explores the use of the child narrator in English and Uzbek prose, with particular attention to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Gafur Ghulam’s Shum Bola. It considers how a child’s perspective can reveal aspects of social life that remain unnoticed or unspoken by adults. The study focuses on first-person narration, focalization, unreliable narration, and the distance between the child who experiences events and the narrator who later recounts them. The analysis shows that the child narrator serves not only to create humour and emotional immediacy but also to expose social injustice, hypocrisy, and restrictive adult values. While the English texts tend to associate childhood with personal freedom and moral awareness, Shum Bola places greater emphasis on survival, poverty, social experience, and cultural memory.