Mark Twain described the major theme of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn as
“A sound heart and a deformed conscience come into
collision, and
conscience suffers defeat.”
• “A sound heart” is a good heart.
• “A deformed conscience” is a conscience
influenced by the laws of society and a
sense of duty toward those laws
Twain’s world
• Huck Finn written as a
sequel to The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer
• Written after the
Emancipation
Proclamation
• The country was still
confused with regards to
race
“By the mark, twain”—
• Racism became worse, with African
American’s being persecuted for trivial and
unfair reasons
• Twain used this confusion to create his society
• Today the novel is seen as an exploration and
historical look at the racial and moral world of
the 1880’s.
• The novel is considered Twain’s masterpiece
• Narrator & Protagonist
– Huck Finn
• Characters
• Jim
• Pap
• Tom
• Duke and King
• Setting
• Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845
• The Mississippi River town of St.
Petersburg, Missouri
The world as portrayed in the novel
Huck
Society
• Fights against
•
authority
• Torn between what
•
he is told and what he
thinks
• Has some aspects of •
childhood innocence
• Believes in a different •
type of education
•
Ruled by fears and
prejudices
Shown as both
good and bad
The wealthy class
is highlighted
Education is key
Religion
Themes
• Racism & Slavery
• Intellectual and
Moral Education
• The Hypocrisy of “Civilized”
Society
Terms
• Symbol: Where you have something that
represents something else.
– Ex: The river represents the need for freedom
• Irony: Where you expect one thing to
happen, but the opposite occurs.
• Paradox: A seemingly contradictory
statement that may nonetheless be true: the
paradox that standing is more tiring than
walking
Terms
• Satire: A literary work in which human
vice or folly is attacked through irony,
derision, or wit.
• Anti-thesis: the rhetorical contrast of
ideas by means of parallel arrangements
of words, clauses, or sentences (as in
“action, not words” or “they promised
freedom and provided slavery
Terms
• Colloquialisms: only appropriate for casual,
ordinary, familiar, or informal conversation
rather than formal speech or writing
The Legacy
• Twain began his career writing light,
humorous verse but evolved into a chronicler
of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous
acts of mankind-this was mimicked by many
American authors.
• Upon Twain’s death, he was lauded as the
"greatest American humorist of his age, and
William Faulkner called Twain "the father of
American literature.”
• Hemingway wrote : “All modern American
literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”