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Huckleberry Finn Satire

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, was an American writer, entrepreneur, and publisher. He was an adventurer with a quick witted attitude and an ambitious use of the pen. His childhood and adolescence came to shape two of the most iconic and influential stories. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The basis of all American Literature came from those two books. These two stories caused Twain to become one of the richest men of his time. Twain was an influential writer to American Literature, he is well known because of his prodigious use of dialogue, satire, and realism. Twain is very well known for his use of dialogue. He had several different techniques that he used to make his dialogue sound …show more content…

In Huckleberry Finn a “good Christian” women owns slaves which to me seems like it is a very hypocritical statement. In an article written by Flora Richards she states, “Mark Twain carefully chose his words and used satire in his books to address controversial or taboo issues that afflicted his society”. He wrote Huck Finn in an attempt to protest and contest the vices of the 19th century and took matters into his own hands when he wrote Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He used these stories to make a point about all the bad things going on in the American culture during his time. Twain realized that Humor was going to be one of the most important ingredient in creating satire, and Mark Twain mastered that art to improve his satire throughout his books. He used his humor to fully allow his reader to be reached by his satire and for it to be fully understood. Some people believed that these stories had nothing to do with satire and were merely just a humorist story. In an article written by Leo Marx, Twain came out to say, “The truly profound meanings of the novel are generated by the impingement [through satire] of the actual world…“Huck is a funny book suitable for children, too, but the grownups who read it will find depths in its humor and in its meaning” (12). There truly is a deeper meaning to his stories, the use of humor towards the topics …show more content…

Realism was very popular during the time of the civil war and at the turn of the century. He used it in his stories to portray the middle and lower class people of the post-civil war era. He was a regional writer and wrote most of his stories based off his childhood and adolescence. “He emaciated and dignified the speech and manners of a class of people largely neglected by writers and largely ignored by genteel America”. (87) He knew exactly how to portray each character correctly. Jim who was an uneducated illiterate slave was portrayed almost impeccably. An example of his way of speaking is, "Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it." (Twain 39) This quote is just one of the many examples of how the slaves spoke. He correctly portrayed how they spoke and made all the characters in his stories have separate and distinct accents. Not only did Twain know how to correctly and distinctively portray each character. He also knew how to make his setting very realistic. Because of his past experiences as steam boat engineer, Mark Twain was easily able to describe settings in detail and give the reader a good mental picture of what was going on and the area around where it was happening. An example of this in Huck Finn is, “The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line - that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then

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