Satire In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain

People use sarcasm as a form of humor in our everyday lives. Sarcasm is the use of irony to mock or convey contempt. Some authors use satire to mock or make fun of mistakes of society in their novels. Mark Twain uses satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a fictional novel that follows the journey of a young boy, Huckleberry Finn. Starting in the beginning of the novel Huck escapes to a small island where he meets a runaway slave, Jim, and together they journey down the Mississippi River. Twain’s use of satire ridicules hypocrisy and ignorance in society before the civil war. Twain uses satire in his novel to make fun of hypocrisy. He uses it at the beginning of the novel when Huck’s father is complaining about the government. Pap

Huck believes that when you pray you can get anything that you want. He says, “She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, butnohooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks… By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way” (Twain 15). Huck does not understand how religion and prayer works. The widow and Watson try to explain God in two different ways: good and bad which causes Huck to believe that there are two different gods and he rather believe in widow Douglas’ God, the good one. Although Huck does not admire Miss Watson as much as he does widow Douglas, he does know that she tried to help him a bit. Huck helping Jim begins to make him feel guilty until he hears Jim speak about what he will do once he becomes a free man: “ It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free” (Twain 123). It was common for southern children to be raised to think that slaves were not human and did not have feelings. Jim’s burst of emotion allows Huck to realize that Jim really is a human with feelings; he cares about his family and speaks about them with so much passion that it causes Huck to not feel too bad about what he is doing anymore. Another example of ignorance is between feuding families, the Grangerfords and Sheperdonsons. These families have been feuding for a while and most of them do not even know the reason for the feud. Buck, one of the younger Grangerfords, tells Huck a story about how he killed one of the Sheperdsons and Huck asks, “‘Did you want to kill him, Buck? "Well, I bet I did." "What did he do to you?" "Him? He never done nothing to me." "Well, then, what did