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Fatima Jinnah Women University
Presentation Write-up
American Literature
Novel assigned: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
M.Phil Literature
Presented to: Dr. Saman Saif
The Element of Humour in Huck Finn &
Marxist Analysis
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Born in 1835 as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain grew up in Missouri Southern part of
America, which was a slave state during his childhood. He would later incorporate his formative
experiences of the institution of slavery into his writings. His ancestry was mostly Irish and
English who had lived most of their life in North America. His father was a business man who
never thrived.
As a teenager, Twain worked as a printer’s apprentice and later as a typesetter, during which
time he also became a contributor of articles and humorous sketches to his brother Orion’s
newspaper. On a voyage to New Orleans, Twain decided to become a steamboat pilot and
worked as a boat captain on the Mississippi river. Unsurprisingly, the Mississippi River is an
important setting in much of Twain’s work. Twain also spent much of his life travelling across
the United States. The words “mark twain” are actually used by boat pilots to describe the depth
of a river that it’s two fathoms deep, and that’s where he got his pen name.
When the outbreak of the Civil War brought his piloting career to an end, he successfully
returned to the newspaper world. In 1864, he moved to San Francisco, where he continued his
newspaper work that catapulted him to national prominence and established him as a spokesman
for the vanishing American frontier. Twain later decided to go east to New York City. Despite
his “frontier” humor and Southern speech, he became an Easterner who looked nostalgically to
the South for his literary landscape and to the West for his values. In effect, Twain was split
between the progressive, materialistic East of the future and the reactionary, individualistic
Southwest of the past.
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In 1886, an overconfident Twain optimistically believed in technology and in the promise of a
typesetting machine got bankrupt by investing in it. Although he recovered financially, Twain
suffered several setbacks from which he never fully recovered. While he was in England in 1896,
his favorite daughter died of meningitis; his already frail wife died in 1904, after suffering from
physical and mental problems; his daughter Clara married and settled in Europe in 1909; Jean,
his other daughter, died scarcely two months after Clara’s marriage.
Despite the misfortunes that plagued him after 1898, Twain continued to write prolifically, but
most of this material, because of its nihilistic/deterministic philosophy, was not published until
after his death. Twain, who had been left quite alone by Clara’s marriage and the deaths of his
wife and other children, died on April 21, 1910 with a heart attack.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain gave America the prototypical initiation
novel, but his humor and nostalgia for the past increasingly gave way to his pessimism about
man’s technological “progress.” Posterity prefers his two famous novels about boyhood along
the banks of the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884).
Twain was very much a product of his age. As a spokesman for an already vanishing American
frontier, he satirized the pretense and the institutions of the East while he yearned for the lost
values of youth and individualism. These nineteenth century values were in conflict with the
twentieth century technology he first embraced and then came to despise.
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The Novel “Huckleberry Finn”
“A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience.”
Although several initial reviews were negative, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was also quickly
commended as an American classic for its expression of the American imagination. The ability
to adapt to any situation, the tranquility and promise of the country's great river, and the colorful
and varied characters that inhabited the vanishing frontier are all represented within its pages.
These elements prompted one of the most famous observations about Huck Finn in 1935, when
Ernest Hemingway remarked that "all modern American literature comes from one book by
Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . . . . It's the best book we've had. All American writing
comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." The novel is,
indeed, a masterful display of hoaxes, frauds, and pranks, all elements of American humor that
Twain had explored in his own readings and previous writings.
The subtitle of the novel Huckleberry Finn is “Tom Sawyer’s Comrade”, the reason being that in
1876, the same year as the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain began
work on another boy's tale of adventure along the Mississippi. After deciding that Tom was unfit
to narrate the book, Twain chose Tom's counterpart, the disreputable Huckleberry Finn. Huck
was already well known to an American audience who were thirsting for more of Twain's brand
of humor, and Twain hoped to capitalize on his recent literary successes.
Twain began writing the novel in the Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War had ended in 1865
and slavery was abolished in the United States. But even though slavery was abolished, the white
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majority nonetheless systematically oppressed the black minority, with institutionalized racial
segregation. Mark Twain, a stalwart abolitionist and advocate for emancipation, seems to be
critiquing the racial segregation and oppression of his day by exploring the theme of slavery
in Huckleberry Finn. Also significant to the novel is the Second Great Awakening, a religious
revival that occurred in the United States from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth
century. Twain was critical of religious revivalism on the grounds that Christians didn’t
necessarily act morally and were so zealous as to be easily fooled, a critique articulated
in Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain composed Huckleberry using not a high literary style but local
dialects that he took great pains to reproduce with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.
The book's loose structure may be classified as a picaresque narrative because its unity derives
from following a central rogue-like character through a series of episodes. The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn treats questions of illusion and reality by portraying Huck's contact with a
number of levels of society which ends in Huck's education or growth, his maturation through
experience and insight.
The novel is written in first person by allowing Huck, the protagonist to tell his own story.
Twain used his realistic fiction to address America’s most painful contradiction of racism and
segregation in a “free” and “equal” society. Because the audience is given the experience of
being “inside” the protagonist’s head, there is a direct link between protagonist and the audience;
it creates an immediate connection with the reader. Readers have a tendency to give a first
person voice more authority when they hear it, so they believe him more. Fist person narration
helps understand the character better, and it’s more close to natural that’s why we can filter the
story better through his perspective.
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The second equally effective technique is the technique of capturing the speech pattern of the
southern people. Mark Twain had been familiar with the way people speak an informal language,
he uses spellings to give the speech that texture and sound it requires for sounding real. This
colloquial nature of the language of southern people is represented by Twain metonymically.
The Element of Humour
Humour and wit is a dominant part of Huckleberry Finn, it’s the quality of being comic, amusing
and funny that accompanies the satirical theme of the novel. Both the satire and irony in this
novel spring out as humourous due to Twains smart use of language and his way of mocking the
superficiality of the genteel society.
In America, burlesques often poked fun at aristocratic types who were subjected to the lowly
conditions of the American city or frontier, and they extolled the virtues of a democracy over the
pretensions of Europe's high society. Satire on the other hand is the use of humor and wit with a
critical attitude that is ironical, sarcastic to expose a vice or folly, etc. Mark Twain is well known
for his adept adaptations of burlesques and social satires in his works. In The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn he used the technique to critique the aristocratic pretensions of the King and
Duke, and the romantic fantasies of Tom Sawyer.
Twain's uses satire to ridicule many things in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". One of his
favorite targets is the idea of Romanticism, the character of Tom Sawyer is used to represent
many of the weaknesses Twain saw in the Romantic view of life. For instance, at the beginning
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of the novel, Twain satirizes the hypocrisy of romanticism using Tom's gang, the boys will
supposedly rob, steal, and murder each day but Sunday, because that's the day they go to church.
At the beginning of their journey down the Mississippi, Huck and Jim come across a wrecked
steamboat named the 'Walter Scott". Scott was a very popular romantic author, known especially
for his novel "Ivanhoe". By describing the Walter Scott as "wrecked", Twain is implying that
romantic ideals are also "wrecked" and dysfunctional
What's funny about Huckleberry Finn is that it's a humorous story. The story is humorous
because it's told by the quintessential American Boy, Huck Finn, and according to the American
humorist, Mark Twain, the humorous story is quintessentially American. Here is how Twain
explains it, in a late essay entitled "How To Tell A Story":
“The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, and the witty story is French. The
humorous story depends for its effect on the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story
upon the matter. . . . The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is
strictly a work of art - high and delicate art - and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling
the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his
best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of
the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it
with an eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.”
Huckleberry Finn is written in a distinctive and a uniquely American mode of being funny - a
Trickster's mode with an American slant. The humour of this book exists within the historical
context, the Reconstructionist Southwest, which was both racist and egalitarian, and such
hypocrisy could easily be made a butt of ridicule. It is a comic form called “Deadpan” that
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makes this novel so uniquely American in humour. This comic form is familiar to Americans
through a wide range of folklore, from Yankee Peddler to Riverboat Con Man, and particularly
the Western Tall Tale.
Deadpan: It is a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in
emotion or body language. It is usually spoken in a casual, monotone, or cantankerous voice, and
expresses a calm, sincere, or grave demeanor, often in spite of the ridiculousness of the subject
matter. The joke is told "gravely," the teller is straight-faced, he recounts in earnest detail how
something extraordinary happened and funnily the listener believes and marvels at the story. For
example when Tom and Huck play robbery games with other boys, they decide that on Sundays
they won’t scare and loot people because Sundays are to be respected religiously.
Tall Tale humor: Tall tales are often told in a way that makes the narrator seem to have been a
part of the story. They are usually humorous or good-natured. The line between legends and tall
tales is distinguished primarily by age; many legends exaggerate the exploits of their heroes, but
in tall tales the exaggeration looms large, to the extent of becoming the whole of the story. The
tall tale is a fundamental element of American folk literature.
For example when Huck enters the woman's house and introduces himself as "Sarah Williams
from Hookerville." Accepting Huck as a girl, the woman talks freely about the town's events and
eventually reaches the subject of Huck and Tom, the reward money, and Huck's "murder”. It
makes us laugh at his tick. Further when the woman he’s fooling tests him by making him put a
thread through the needle to see if he really is a girl is again humourous.
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Twain uses humor to spotlight religious hypocrisy. Miss Watson, who teaches Finn, takes
it upon herself to instruct Huck in religious matters and on how one should act if they
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hope to reach heaven. This is ironic, as she owns slaves. The owning of slaves is
condemned in her Bible, but she has them anyway. Huck’s conscience tells him to save
Jim from being enslaved though it’s against the social norm, by doing so he thinks he’s
signing a pact with the devil and acting against conventional religion that seems to make
no sense to him.
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An example of sarcastic humor in the novel is the scene where Huck's "Aunt Sally," Mrs.
Phelps, mistakes Huck for her relative Tom Sawyer. Huck tells her a story about a
steamboat accident and says the explosion was so dangerous a black man died. Mrs.
Phelp's responded with "lucky, that no one got hurt." It is a racist comment that has an
underlying meaning beyond the surface meaning. Twain is emphasizing the racist
feelings many Americans had.
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Sometimes Twain incorporates humorous scenes just to make the reader laugh. Example
of comedic humor is in Chapter 33 when Tom, pretending to be somebody else, kisses his
Aunt Sally. She is so surprised at his action she starts to yell at him. Tom then proceeds
to make up a story saying the locals told him to do it. He tries to close the argument
saying, "I'm honest about it; I won't ever do it again. Until you ask me," which sets off a
new argument.
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The theme of Death is prevalent in the novel, metaphorically signaling the declining
traditions of South by its hypocrisy, Finn’s own fake attempt to show himself butchered
by the robbers, the dead corpse floating in the river and the feuds killing each other are
some examples. The greedy conmen pretending to be heirs of the dead man at funeral,
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ironically mocks man’s civilization which only brought more cruelty to society in the
form of slavery and racism.
Marxist Criticism of the Novel
All the characters in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that have socio-economic power are
morally horrible, abuse their power, and use capitalistic means to exploit that power. Mark
Twain uses this book to highlight problems such as racial issues, religious hypocrisy, and the
enlargement of the gap between the rich and the poor which caused cultural differences and class
segregation. In his book, he combines the Marxist ideas and the issue of Capitalism to focus on
key problems. According to Karl Marx, capitalists are able to make profits only by exploiting
their workers. Socio-economic conditions play a great role in determining one’s status in the
society.
The King and Duke are major examples of capitalism because as con men, they exploit people
for their own gain. An example of this is when they cheated the town with a bogus performance.
The first group of people wanted another group to come so that they would be tricked too so they
tell their friends to go, and both groups come back a third night with things to throw at the king
and the duke. They provide their own means of production, live by the profit motive, and exist
only to make money any way they can. They commodify the audience by tricking them into
buying tickets for the show. In another major exploitation, the both of them pretend to be the
English cousins of a very rich deceased man, claiming all of his belongings, not caring about the
current situation of the daughters of the deceased man or even feeling guilty about what they’re
doing. Twain directly expresses his dissatisfaction with that situation by having Huck say “It was
enough to make a body ashamed of the human race”. Huck is obviously disgusted with the King
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and Duke’s attitude towards money when they commodify even a dead body for profit. Clearly
Twain doesn’t agree with the ideas of capitalism. For their last big prank, the Duke and King sell
Jim as a runaway slave.
Throughout the book an apparent gap or class distinction between rich (Haves) and poor (have
nots) and their cultures is evident. When Huck is living with Mrs. Watson and spills salt, he, as
his culture has taught him, wants to throw it over his shoulder for luck. “I reached for some of
the salt as quick as I could to throw over my left shoulder to keep off the bad luck, but Miss
Watson was ahead of me, and crossed me off”. Miss Watson’s “civilized” culture does not
believe in bad luck in the way that Huck’s poor culture does. The “civilized” culture also has a
sense of cleanliness that the poor culture lacks. “Pretty soon I wanted a smoke, and asked the
widow to let me. But she wouldn’t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean”. The
differences become increasingly apparent when Mrs. Watson is ranting at Huck about doing
things right. “Miss Watson would say, ‘Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry’; and ‘Don’t
scrunch up like that, Huckleberry- set up strait’”. The conflict and differences between the
cultures are so intense that the two cultures cannot even mix, resulting in tensions and class
warfare as shown by Pap’s conflict with the village
The oppressive ideology of religion is also at play which keeps the oppressor manipulating the
poor in a patronizing way in the name of social norms and religious beliefs. Ms Watson owns
slaves who are poor and treats them badly just because she’s been taught that “God mandates
slavery”. She manipulates the religion to justify her hegemonic control over the inferior class.
This ideology keeps the poor under the illusion that they are destined to be treated badly.
Throughout the book, Twain satirically shows that morally questionable people rise to power
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through capitalism, the gap between rich and poor is enlarged in a capitalistic society which
oppresses working class only on the basis of economic power and social status.