Adventures of Huckleberry Finn : As a Satire

    

     In general, satire is a type of literature and sometimes pictorial arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule perfectly with the intent to humiliate individuals and society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually intended to be humorous, its primary purpose is often constructive in nature, utilizing wit as a tool.

   Satire is nowadays found in many artistic forms of expression, including literature, plays, commentary, and media. In fact, there are various types of satire that are not meant to be funny at all. On the other hand, not all humour, even on such topics as politics, religion, or art, is necessarily mocking, even when it uses the satirical tools of irony, parody, and mockery. Ironical satire, in some cases, has been regarded as the most effective source to understand a society. It provides a keen insight into any society’s overall psychology; it reveals its deepest values, tastes, and structures of power.

   Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to be read and analyzed as a satirical work. It has targeted many social classes, their way of thinking, as well as their way of acting. To achieve this with success, the author has used a twelve-year-old protagonist who laughed at the corrupt society, denouncing swindling, drunkenness, and materialism. The hero Huck used his inventiveness, quickness, morality, innocence, and love of adventure to ridicule not only the above-mentioned vices, but also social, cultural, and institutional norms. Huck says related to his father’s drinking habits, “Every time he got money, he got drunk; and every time he got drunk, he raised Cain around town; and every time he raised Cain, he got jailed. He was just suited-this kind of thing was right in his line.” Violence was one of the first evils that Twain satirized. He first presented the most frequent forms of it through Pap Finn’s (father of Huck) brutality, the bloodshed resulting from a disagreement opposing two aristocratic families, and Lynch Law. All these social vices had plagued American society witnessed by Mark Twain, and remained on his mind since his childhood. He found no other means to fight it but through satire, which is a much well-organized and powerful tool than any other means in terms of ridding society of vices and other impious practices.

   The other major evil that Mark Twain wanted to denounce with all his might was slavery. In the mid-nineteenth century, life on the frontier was based on slavery. A slave was not a man who could be sold anywhere at any time, and had no way to show his worth and claim his rights. The author himself was born and grew up in a slave-holding society, intended not only to reveal slaves’ conditions, but also to denounce and condemn slavery. A slave was considered subhuman in many passages of Huckleberry Finn. Surely, the most shocking scene is the slave auction, where slaves are considered not as humans, but as mere property to be sold anyhow, when they are no longer needed. Huck gives a full spectacle of it in this novel.

   Certainly, one of Twain’s goals was proving to the entire humankind that a slave too was a man, that blacks were no different than whites, since the latter too were subjects to the same follies as blacks. Besides, in some cases, Mark Twain presented a black being as kind, more loyal, and more superior in morals than whites, like in the case of Jim. To achieve his goal, Twain used various means, such as allowing Jim to achieve positive things, allowing him to display his human sentiments as well as good-natured, kind-hearted and his loyalty.

   From the above discussion, Huckleberry Finn appears to be simultaneously a literary, sociological, and anthropological text. It deals with a real situation, in a precise part of the world, and during a determined period of time. Twain chose characters who give a clear idea of mid-nineteenth-century frontiersmen and their way of living, thinking, and acting. This novel took inspiration from the author’s day-to-day life, which is not far from reality. While writing this research paper, we also came to know that Mark Twain has tried his utmost in satirizing various social aspects of his own American society through Huckleberry Finn. It is a landmark novel in the sense that it has helped in bringing social changes in the said society. In this way, Mark Twain has joined hands with the American pioneers of the social cause, who were Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln.