Examples Of Satire In Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains several satirical messages. Twain applies various techniques to deliver his criticism of different aspects of life in the 1800s. In particular, he uses his novel to satirize society’s view of morality and religion. A few prime examples of this occur among the main characters Huckleberry Finn, Jim, and Tom Sawyer.

Huckleberry faces the decision between doing what is best for his friend versus what is best for Mrs. Watson, the sister to the widow who previously adopted Huckleberry. Jim is a runaway slave who joins Huckleberry on his raft as they escape the town. Several days after joining and befriending Jim, Huckleberry begins considering the effects of Jim running towards freedom,

Huckleberry feels that Jim’s freedom is the consequence of his own actions, and so he must return Jim to his owner Mrs. Watson before it is too late. However, he has trouble when he tries to tell on Jim because Jim calls out that Huck is “de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ol’ Jim” (pg 83). Huckleberry realizes that he would feel bad about returning Jim to slavery, so he decides against doing what he had previously deemed as the right thing to do. He even debates the morality of making the right and wrong choices and decides that if it is too much trouble to do the right thing, then it is better to simply do “whichever come handiest at the time” (page 85). Twain is satirizing the morality between right and wrong in this situation because he knows that people might be making the right choice, but that

The most evident examples of this are the characters themselves. For instance, the widow Douglas tells Huckleberry that he should not smoke because it is “a mean practice and wasn’t clean,” but then he finds out that “she took snuff… [but] of course that was all right, because she done it herself” (page 6). The widow is supposedly a pure Christian woman, but her limitations on tobacco are unclear because she sniffs the drug but won’t allow Huckleberry to smoke it. Twain seems to be satirizing religion in this situation for being hypocritical because of its values. Also, Mrs. Watson owns several slaves. While slavery was certainly a common issue that was debated over during the 1800s, it was not typically something that Christian women would support. Again, Twain is satirizing religion for its hypocrisy because people do not always commit to the values that they say they believe in. Therefore, Twain’s satire of religion is valid because he shows how hypocritical it is in various ways throughout the