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The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mr. Mark Twain

Decent Essays

After the Civil War and through the nineteenth century, local color literature was most dominant in American literature. From the very beginning, within the first few pages, or even sentences, the evidence of local color prevails in the novel of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by “Mr. Mark Twain” (106). Local color is defined by Donna Campbell of Washington State University as “fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region.” The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest examples and reveals all the characteristics of local color writing. The first characteristic of local color writing is setting. The setting is the most fundamental element of the story. It is geared towards the emphasis of the limitations nature imposes; settings are usually isolated. The settings and the metaphors and life lessons it imposes are crucial to the development of the story and its characters. At the beginning of the adventures Huckleberry (Huck) and Jim set out on, the two runaways find each other at Jackson Island. The uninhabited, remote location, is the beginning of the struggles the two face. The pair are isolated for much of the novel upon a raft down the Mississippi River in hopes to make it to Cairo, Illinois, “[but], the second night a fog begun to come on” and separated the two temporarily putting them past their desired destination (154). Generally, the larger idea of the

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