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Huckleberry Finn Satirical Analysis

Decent Essays

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, is a classic novel that has been read for decades. It is about a boy, Huckleberry Finn, who goes on an adventure down the Mississippi River. He runs away from his drunkard and abusive father by faking his death and escaping through a hole he sawed in the house. He canoes to an island where he finds Jim, a runaway slave that served a widow with whom Huck used to live. Together they travel down the river and come across many different people including robbers, "royalty", and Huck's friend Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain uses this novel to criticize certain institutions through satire including cultural, familial, and governmental institutions. Twain uses satire to highlight and distinguish …show more content…

The two men join Huck and Jim on their journey. One of the men say that he is the Duke of Bridgewater and the other says he is Louis the Sixteenth's son and should be the King of France. Huck knows that they are both lying but he goes along with their demands to call them "Your Majesty" and wait on them to keep the peace on the raft. When the four of them stopped in a town, the duke and the king split up. The king went to a meeting and claimed that he was a pirate that was going to turn his life around. By the end of the night, he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents through a lie. The duke went to a printing press and printed out advertisements and made a couple dollars as well. The duke and the king continue to lie and scam as they go to other towns by pretending like they are famous …show more content…

However, the play consisted of the king on all fours, naked with his body painted. The crowd was outraged but instead of leaving as fools for being tricked, they told the rest of the town that the play was great (Twain 162). Twain displays the theme of selfishness in every interaction with the duke and the king. The first scam was selfishness on their part by scamming a religious meeting. But through this play, everyone in the audience would rather let the rest of the town be scammed than to be called a fool. Overall, Twain uses satire to criticize social, political, and cultural institutions throughout the novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has many themes and most of the themes are highlighted through Twain's use of satire and irony. The whole book pervades the racist theme simply by the way Twain words the novel. The conversation Huck has with Buck about the family feud is a mockery of the idea of a feud because it does not make any logical sense. Lastly, the duke and the king bring in the idea of selfishness through their many

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