Huck Finn

In 1884, Samuel Clemens, writing under the pen name of Mark Twain, published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a follow-up to his first successful novel Tom Sawyer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn quickly became a highly controversial novel due to its negative views of the South and the use of the word “nigger.” Putting these two critical views aside, readers can find The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be a realistic and meaningful novel, as it was meant to be. One of the many elements that Mark Twain included in the novel to make it successful was satire. There are many examples of satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The most noticeble and important examples are the character Tom Sawyer, who satirizes Romanticism throughout the novel, the character Emmeline Grangerford, who satirizes Dark Romanticism through her poems and crayon drawings that Huck Finn discovers in the story, and the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons which satirizes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The character Tom Sawyer, introduced at the beginning of the novel as Huck Finn’s best friend, is Twain’s main method of satirizing Romanticism in the novel. Because Tom is an avid reader of books that include romantic elements such as nature, unrealistic events, and perfect heros, all of his ideas and plans that he uses for simple amusement or to pull off schemes are “by the book.” This means that he allows his knowledge of the romantic books to influence his ideas and methods on how to do things. When Tom sets his plans into action, he always tries to mimic, as much as possible, the events and methods of action described in the books. “Why blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?” (Twain, 14-15). Even if the methods of action are extremely impractical and unnecessary, he will still follow them. Many times in the novel, his ways are so romanticism based and “by the book” that the reader may get irritated by it. By achieving this effect, Twain oversuccessfully satirizes romanticism in his novel.

Another example of satire happens in the middle of the novel. Huck is helping out a runaway slave named Jim and they embark on a journey down the Mississippi River. However, when a large river boat destroys their raft, the two are seperated. Eventually, Huck meets and is taken in by the Grangerford family. During his temporary stay, Huck becomes fascinated by the literary and artistic works of one of the Grangerford daughters, Emmeline, who had been deceased for several years. Her works included many drawings and poems, both with very dark romantic themes. Emmeline loved to draw unusual pictures of people mourning, suffering, or even near death. Everytime a person died, she would write a sad poem as a “tribute” to the dead person. Huck later discovers that Emmeline passed away from sadness due to the fact that she was unable to complete a poem for a deceased person named Whistler (She was unable to find any words that rhymed with Whistler). “Every time