Finny is the only character in the novel for whom Knowles does not provide a last name. Unlike Gene Forrester, whose name offers two different meanings (well-born and hardy), Finny's character needs no qualification: Finny is just Finny.
True to his aquatic-sounding name, Finny lives in action like a fish in water — moving, playing, challenging others to join him. Finny's game of blitzball, for example, expresses his essential nature with its spontaneous style of play and its rules made up on the run.
For all of his immediacy, though, Finny appears to the reader only from Gene's perspective. As narrator, Gene shares his own feelings while observing Finny's actions and speech, but he never enters his friend's thoughts. For example, Gene (and the reader) learns only late in the novel that Finny desperately wants to enlist in the military — any military — and that his fantasy about the fake war simply represents a way of hiding his pain.
Because Gene focuses so much on Finny, Finny himself assumes a paradoxical role in the story — neither narrator nor protagonist, yet still clearly central to the novel. And while most fictional characters come alive because they change over the course of the story, Finny's vitality emerges instead from the fact that he remains the same — his fundamental characteristics consistent from beginning to end.
