The most brilliant controversial works of art are often banned and kept hidden from the lives of young children, adolescences and sometimes adults. Mark Twain’s notorious ‘Huckleberry Finn’ uses literature as an incredible tool in addressing certain aspects of the society. This provokes a troubling yet satisfying tension between the reader and the narrator. Mark Twain represents the societal crisis, racism, in a factious novel by illustrating the issue of racism in a way that portrays reality as infinitely more horrifying.
Before beginning to discuss the artistic and political importance of “Huckleberry Finn” I feel that one must look at the book itself and the time in which it was written. This novel was published in December 1884 in the UK and 1885 in America. One of the key
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However, the use of dialects in Twain’s novel poses the question; does it make the novel less of an achievement? Twain’s use of dialect, which has proved controversial over the years, certainly adds to the vividness of Huckleberry Finn. Because it is sometimes difficult to understand the speech while reading, we are almost forced to read aloud: at the very least, one has to be able to “hear” the voices in one’s own head. Performance is important in this novel, as Tom Sawyer’s follies and the duke and the dauphin’s cons demonstrate. In the world of the novel, the way in which a character converses is closely related to that character’s status in society. Huck, a character born in poverty and lived on the margins of society since then, speaks in a much rougher, more uneducated-sounding dialect than that of Tom. Jim’s speech, meanwhile, which also can be seen as rough also comes across as uneducated. However, it is not all that different from Huck’s speech or the speech of other white characters. It seems as though Twain is implying that it is wealth and upbringing separate people in a bigger way than ignorance or