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A Mirror For A Flawed Society

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A Mirror for a Flawed Society: Satire in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn People often laugh at shows like The Simpsons or The Colbert Report without the realization that the shows oftentime poke fun at the viewers. Everywhere one looks—books, movies, television, the internet, etc.— satire subtly appears like a mirror as a method of inspiring self-change. And the creative minds of today take a page from Mark Twain, one of the best and most prolific users of satire in his many published works. In Twain’s post-Civil War American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he purposely creates characters with disillusions order to satirize human nature as man often fails to reflect on his everyday flaws, beliefs, and behaviors.
Romanticism
An attraction to Romanticism causes a person to act—and therefore appear— more honorable and intelligent then in reality. In reality, everyone possesses character and physical flaws of some sort, yet most people try to hide their flaws in order to appear better than others. When the Royal Nonesuch prepare a Shakespeare performance, the Duke quotes the following as part of Hamlet’s Soliloquy:
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin/That makes calamity of so longlife;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,/But that the fear of something after death /Murders the innocent sleep,/Great nature 's second course, /And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune/Than fly to others that we know not of. (Twain

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