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The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain

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Satire in Huckleberry Finn

In the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, we are told a story about a young boy and his slave companion’s journey down the Mississippi River and all of their encounters with other characters. Twain constructed a beautiful narrative on how young Huck Finn, the protagonist in the story, learns about the world and from other adult characters, how he is shaped into his own person. At the time this book was made however, this novel provided serious social commentary on current events, such as slavery, and pointing out hypocrisies in how people are taught to see the world when in actuality it is wrong. Twain expertly crafts a novel that not only tells an amazing story of a southern boy growing into his own character by learning from other characters, but also a novel that perfectly uses satire to point out the flaws in society. How Mark Twain went about writing satire in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is an interesting topic in of itself. Twain subtly uses satirical humor throughout the novel to get the reader’s attention and laugh while at the same time get his point across. “[Humor] is among the most important ingredients that make satire interesting and attractive… ‘It may be aggressive and derisive…it can be playful or intelligent, it can even be serious, [and] as satire…; it cannot be false…Humor…cannot desert truth’” (Nyirubugara, I.3). Things such as slavery, moral values, how children are molded from the views of

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