Jan 29, 2016
• “A sound heart” is a good heart.
• “A deformed conscience” is a conscience influenced by the laws of society and a sense of duty toward those laws
Mark Twain described the major theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as
“A sound heart and a deformed conscience come into
collision, and conscience suffers defeat.”
Twain’s world• Huck Finn written as a
sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer• Written after the
Emancipation Proclamation • The country was still
confused with regards to race
“By the mark, twain”—
• Racism became worse, with African American’s being persecuted for trivial and unfair reasons
• Twain used this confusion to create his society• Today the novel is seen as an exploration and
historical look at the racial and moral world of the 1880’s.
• The novel is considered Twain’s masterpiece
• Narrator & Protagonist –Huck Finn
• Characters• Jim• Pap• Tom• Duke and King
• Setting• Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845 • The Mississippi River town of St.
Petersburg, Missouri
The world as portrayed in the novelHuck• Fights against
authority• Torn between what
he is told and what he thinks
• Has some aspects of childhood innocence
• Believes in a different type of education
Society• Ruled by fears and
prejudices• Shown as both good
and bad• The wealthy class is
highlighted• Education is key• Religion
Themes• Racism & Slavery
• Intellectual and Moral Education
• The Hypocrisy of “Civilized” Society
Terms • Symbol: Where you have something that
represents something else.– Ex: The river represents the need for freedom
• Irony: Where you expect one thing to happen, but the opposite occurs.
• Paradox: A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true: the paradox that standing is more tiring than walking
Terms• Satire: A literary work in which human
vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
• Anti-thesis: the rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences (as in “action, not words” or “they promised freedom and provided slavery
Terms
• Colloquialisms: only appropriate for casual, ordinary, familiar, or informal conversation rather than formal speech or writing
The Legacy • Twain began his career writing light,
humorous verse but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind-this was mimicked by many American authors.
• Upon Twain’s death, he was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age, and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature.”
• Hemingway wrote : “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”