Huck Finn Civil War Analysis

In the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, author Mark Twain attacks the corruptness of Southern society after the Civil War. Through Huck’s wild journey in freeing a runaway slave named Jim, Twain ridicules many problems facing American society in the 1800’s to give the reader insight on the social horrors embedded in the culture and lifestyle of Americans in the American South. Having lived through the Civil War and experiencing its end result on the nation, Twain reflects his own post-Civil War observations throughout the novel as he reveals the truth about living in the reconstructing South during the years after what is known as America’s bloodiest clash. Within white society, Twain satirizes the South’s perspective of “civilization”

In Huck’s mind, civilization is the opposite of freedom due to its restrictive factors and ways of life. Widow Douglas adopted Huck to “civilize” him, but she has done just the opposite. At the end of the book, Huck states that “I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before” (Twain 294). If civilization just means unnecessary rules, school work, people telling him what to do and scratchy clothing, Huck can do just fine without it. On the raft going down the Mississippi, Huck drifts away from civilization and begins to see the hypocrisy behind the society he lives in. Huck attempts to escape society’s “civilized” ways and aims to reach his own individualism in which he takes him his own morals. In the words of Twain himself, “our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing full of cruelties, vanities, arrogance, meannesses and hypocrisies”, emphasizing the fact that the civilization of the South was everything but polished and civilized. Overall, civilization does not only represent Huck’s crushed natural spirit through his confinement, but also indicates the bad quality of misapprehensions within American

Through religious hypocrisy, Twain ridicules the white citizens that constantly go to church, but do the opposite of what is morally just. In the beginning of the book, Widow Douglas demands that Huck prays everyday, yet while she is trying to teach Huck about religion and how he must behave, she owns a slave, contradicting everything that she’s teaching. Twain’s main purpose in satirizing different aspects of American society is to open the eyes of the reader to the social atrocities embedded in the everyday lives of Southerners after the Civil War. By using situational irony, grotesque, parody, deflation and farce, Twain succeeds in poking fun at the South’s attempt at social reconstruction after they lost the “war between the states” in 1865. Mark Twain uses humor to develop the different themes of social development within his novel. As a whole, the novel is not supposed to be a source of comedy as there is a serious issue in the shadow of his humorous work. All through the book, Twain ridicules and mocks the ignorance of American people for their uncivilized civilization. Likewise, Twain’s main aim in publishing this novel was to make a declaration concerning the Southern society’s poor quality at the