Examples Of Satire In Huckleberry Finn

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a novel that describes various American situations during the 1800s through the perspective of a young boy named Huckleberry Finn. This book narrates and focuses on the ‘adventures’ that Huck goes through with other characters. On his way down the Mississippi River, Huck meets new people, faces challenges, and makes up lies to cover himself and the people he meets. Although it may seem as a classical novel, it contains many instances in which satire was used to expose the characters by emphasizing their character and personality using irony and humor. Twain used satire to ultimately describe and make fun of the way that society behaved during the pre-Civil War period in the 1800s. Mark Twain does this by targeting the hypocrisy of religion, the father figure, and the gullibility of society. Religion is one of the main topics that Mark Twain makes fun of in the novel. It is the hypocrisy of religion that Twain describes through Huckleberry …show more content…

He continued it off with the gang which Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were part of. The gang, called ‘Tom Sawyer’s gang,’ consisted of a group of kids who were going to be doing robbery and murder around the town. These kids are supposed to be imagined as evil and cruel. However, when they discussed on the day that they would meet again, “Ben Rogers said he couldn’t get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing” (Twain 10). This is both ironic and humorous since they [the kids] make themselves believe that they are savage and ‘dangerous’ but are really not as they do not want to meet up Sundays because on Sundays there is church. This satirical element speaks a lot of the way that the characters in the book are and also resembles how Twain perceived society in the pre-Civil War