Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures While Reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens whose pseudonym was Mark Twain was written as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both novels are set in the south, specifically Missouri and along the Mississippi River. The reason Mark Twain was able to write so prolifically about the south, especially Mississippi is because he lived in Hannibal, Mississippi for most of his early life. Because Hannibal is located along the Mississippi River, Samuel Clemens often watched steamboats travel up and down the river. He also eventually became a riverboat pilot, so he knew the life of traveling on the river and how to accurately describe Huck’s travels. These experiences while he was a child helped to inspire his

Though sometimes hard to understand and grammatically incorrect, this dialect helps to emphasize the Southern setting. Jim and Huck vary in their dialect because while Jim is a slave, Huck attended school for a few years. Jim runs his words together while Huck just speaks for an accent. For example, Jim asks, “Warn’ dat de beatenes’ notion in de worl’?” (Twain 94). As pointed out, Jim blurs syllables and words together while also speaking with a strong accent of a slave or as Mark Twain points out in the Explanatory, the Missouri Negro dialect. On the other hand, Huck speaks using “Pike County” dialect, a more common language. Interestingly enough, the duke and the dauphin have a very slight and less prominent dialect than Jim because Jim is a less educated slave. It is still easy to tell, however, that the duke and the dauphin are uneducated and that they are just pretending to be royalty. As shown in the novel and as Mark Twain emphasizes in the Explanatory, he spent much time developing the dialects of each character in order to obtain the most realistic

Twain’s includes dramatic, situational, and verbal irony in the novel, yet he places a special focus on situational irony. For example, the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons leads to situational irony during church. Both families attend the same church where they are taught to show brotherly love toward each other; however, both families bring their guns to church and lean them along the walls or hold them between their legs, the opposite of showing kindness toward one another. Their fighting is also ironic because the feud began thirty years ago and neither family can remember how it started and why they are still fighting. Another example is when Huck and Tom work together to liberate Jim, yet Tom knows that Jim is already declared a free man. A third example is when Jim finds Huck’s father dead in the cabin, but Jim does not tell Huck who the man is. For the rest of the novel, Huck continues to run away with Jim in order to get away from his father, yet his father is not living. Twain’s use of irony helps to enhance the themes in the novel and distinguish his writing