Examples Of Satire In Huckleberry Finn

“Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed.” (Carl Hiaasen) Mark Twain uses the literary device known as satire in the classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to expose the irrational views of society during the time of slavery, through humor. Huck exclaiming that he does not want to go back to live with Widow Douglass, Jim explaining how those who have less cherish their belonging more than those who have more, and the cruelty of the white men toward Jim, show how Mark Twain was showing the ugly side of society to the readers with the use of satire and irony. Society in Huckleberry Finn not only outcasted people because of the color of their skin,

From the first pages of the novel, it is made evident that Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of the story, is a realist. He tends to look at life in the form of cause and effect, but life is not always that way. For example, he did not see the point in praying, if he could not get everything he prayed for in life. He was however, a child, which meant that his imagination was still very active. He loved to escape into nature, and live the life of a bandit along with Tom Sawyer. He felt that civilization did not have anything to offer him, as he was generally uninterested in its ideas. This is why he did not want to go back to the Widow. “This shook me up considerable, because I didn’t want to go back to the widow’s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it. Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he

In order to convince the audience that Jim is human, Twain has Jim prove himself more compassionate than white men. “They cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him a cuff or two side the head once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on him, and chained him again, ...” (Twain 971) Irony can be found in this situation, as a black man spared himself for a white boy, while the other white men beat him horribly. It is even more ironic, because the white men were beating Jim, because they did not consider him human, as white men did not consider black people to be but he was actually showing more human qualities than them at this point in the novel. It is not hilarious, but it does present an interesting case of irony, which is a type of humor in