America is great, of that most of us can agree. Our nation is physically huge, spanning thousands of miles in each direction and taking up a sizeable chunk of North America. It is also great in the sense that (as the song goes) it is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and after all, what doesn’t scream ‘great’ about the American Dream? Mark Twain, in his groundbreaking masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (published in 1884), writes about a young boy named Huck Finn who travels down the Mississippi River with his friend Jim, an escaped slave, on the journey to freedom. Along the way, they encounter many staggering obstacles and must overcome them in order to keep on their way. Huck Finn is a quintessential American novel
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America contains a vast array of people who all have different ways of walking, talking, living, you name it. If Twain had homogenized every character’s speech and ignored dialectal differences it would have taken away from the story. As Huck and Jim (who each speak in unlike ways from each other and from the rest of the population of St. Petersburg) travel South down the Mississippi River, they pass through many different places, where the people are all parts of different socioeconomic groups, and therefore speak distinctly. As the story goes on, this change in how people talk highlights how much of a epic journey they’re on and how much of an array the people they interact with are. Inversely, the dialectal way of writing shows how similar Huck and Jim are, despite their separate ways of speaking. A conversation between the two of them is strange because it seems at times that they are speaking different languages, but they are still on the same page and are very good friends. Twain’s use of dialectal writing highlights his knowledge of the American people and both their differences and
America contains a vast array of people who all have different ways of walking, talking, living, you name it. If Twain had homogenized every character’s speech and ignored dialectal differences it would have taken away from the story. As Huck and Jim (who each speak in unlike ways from each other and from the rest of the population of St. Petersburg) travel South down the Mississippi River, they pass through many different places, where the people are all parts of different socioeconomic groups, and therefore speak distinctly. As the story goes on, this change in how people talk highlights how much of a epic journey they’re on and how much of an array the people they interact with are. Inversely, the dialectal way of writing shows how similar Huck and Jim are, despite their separate ways of speaking. A conversation between the two of them is strange because it seems at times that they are speaking different languages, but they are still on the same page and are very good friends. Twain’s use of dialectal writing highlights his knowledge of the American people and both their differences and