How Does Mark Twain Characterize Slavery In Huck Finn

Mark Twain wrote the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885 which was about a young boy, Huck, along with Jim, a black person, escape from their hometown in the south. Twain originally started out writing this book to be a sequel to Tom Sawyer, but it took a turn of its own. The setting of the novel starts out in St. Petersburg, Missouri, but a majority of the novel is spent along the Mississippi River. In the book, this river symbolizes peace and maturity, but whenever Huck and Jim come onto land there is chaos. In the novel the main character Huck goes through moral crisis and character development which makes this book a Bildungsroman. Throughout Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses satire, to humorously show and explain many aspects …show more content…
Since Twain himself grew up in the south, some of his viewpoints on slavery are also shown in the book. One of the examples of satire on slavery was when Huck was telling Aunt Sally about a steamboat accident and he explained how only a black person was killed. Aunt Sally then responded, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt” (221). When slavery was around it showed how most white people did not see someone of another color as a human being. They usually only saw them as property. Huckleberry Finn even exclaimed, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (214) because he thought that helping Jim, a black person, would be frowned upon and many people including Miss Watson would be ashamed of him. He even considered writing a note to Miss Watson telling her where Jim was, but then decided against it, even though Huck was raised in a place where slavery was accepted. Even after Huck had this moral crisis and decided he was going to help Jim, he still believed it was the wrong thing to do, but did not care of the …show more content…
Twain uses irony, hyperbole and many other literary elements to express satire in his novel. He had many satirical targets in this novel such as slavery, human nature, Romanticism, religion, and multiple others. Twain uses satire in his book to show the corruption of man and the changes that need to take place in society. This was one of the first books that took a path of its own because it did not have the same Romanticism style as many of the books during that century. He showed the truth behind the everyday life during the nineteenth century, whereas most other authors would make reality seem better than it is. Throughout his novel, Twain used satire to humorously show and explain many aspects of life back