Mark Twain's Satire In 'The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn'

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September 15, 2010 Deborah Cooper Wright American Literature Ernest Hemingway claimed that “Huckleberry Finn is the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before…” (excerpt from the lecture on Huckleberry Finn by Professor Ian Johnston of the Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC). True to the admonishments that Mark Twain gives at the first of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I found no motive or plot in his work. However, I did find a moral and I did find that the story was completely about the unique American experience. According to Wikipedia, “a picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail,…show more content…
In the first of his story it was the Widow Douglas that was trying and at the end it was Aunt Sally. Here were two traditional Christian American women that conformed to all the rules of society. In the eyes of society, this made them and their kind civilized. Twain’s satire here is on being “civilized”. What made this an American idea was that Huck Finn, even though he did not know it, was antiestablishment, he did not have to follow the rules set by society. Mark Twain used this concept of being civilized as the backdrop to show the reality of the moral and ethical corruption of society. As Huck floats down the river, he encounters the families of the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords who are devote Christians. The irony here is that they leave their weapons in the front of the church when the go to services together, yet they have been embroiled in a feud with each other for generations. In fact, no one even knows what the feud is over. The motivator for Huck to move on was the fact that they all shot each other to death and Huck did not want to get “kilt”. He also had an encounter with more civilized folks such as the corrupt official that shot the town drunk on a whim and the town’s people had absolutely no recourse and then there were the con artists, the Duke and King. Huck wanted no part in being “sivilized” after seeing and learning what it…show more content…
Being that I was from a very small blue-collar town in West Texas, it really had no impact on me as I had nothing to compare it too. We had nothing like the internet, very limited access to a national newspaper and we did not stay up late enough to watch the news. My world was very small and the folks in my life back then were very similar to the ones in Huck’s life. Much like Huck, I did not know the questions to ask? As far as I knew, everyone in the world lived just like I did. Now, after reading Huck Finn in my later years, my immediate reaction was that I had heard or seen this story before. I had indeed, in the form of a movie called “Forrest Gump”. We were all innocents that life just happened to and none of us had any judgment or cares about the why’s or where’s. It was just how things were. Three American kids, Huck, Forrest and me, had basically been along for the ride while life flowed all around us. We did not know we were poor, not really, and it did not matter what the social issues of the times were. That was just how it was. I grew up and moved out of that small town chasing the American Dream. Huck will continue floating down the river and Forrest will keep running. Life is truly about the journey, not the
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