Literary Experiences In Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Occasionally, the best way of learning something, is by experience. In the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses Huckleberry Finn as the main, developing character that learns throughout his adventurous feat on the Mississippi River. Huck Finn is traveling on a raft with a runaway slave, Jim, and throughout the book, they encountered many people that he acquires a deep understanding from such as the Duke and the Dauphin. The novel is written through Huckleberry’s perspective so that readers will be able to identify what Huck is going through and how he feels about experiencing these events from the Duke and the Dauphin. Mark Twain uses many literary devices such as imagery and point of view to show what Huck is learning,

The Duke and Dauphin put on a play to a large audience. The dauphin, who appears onstage wearing nothing aside from body paint and some crazy apparel, has the audience howling with laughter. But the crowd nearly attacks the duke and the dauphin when the show ends only after a brief performance. The people in the crowd, embarrassed that they were cheated, decide to save their honor by making certain that each and every person in the town gets ripped off. After the performance, they tell everyone else in town that the play was wonderful. The second night, therefore, also brings a capacity crowd. As the duke has anticipated, the crowd on the third night consists of the two previous nights’ audiences coming to get their revenge. Huck and the Duke make a getaway to the raft before the show starts. The Duke and Dauphin steal the innocent townspeople’s money without thinking about how the townspeople would be affected. Though there was a fat profit from the play scam, Huck feels extremely demoralized from what he saw and

In the next town that they want to work over, the dauphin encounters a talkative man who tells him about a recently deceased local man, Peter Wilks. Wilks had recently sent for his two brothers from England. Wilks left much of his property to these brothers when he died, but it doesn’t seem certain whether the brothers will arrive. Arriving in Wilks’s hometown, the duke and the dauphin ask for Wilks and fake anguish when told of his death. The scene is enough to make Huck “ashamed of the human race,” (162). A crowd gathers before the Wilks home to watch Wilks’s three nieces greet the duke and the dauphin, whom they think to be their uncles. Huck has “never seen anything so disgusting,” (164). As the plot unfolds, the dauphin sells off the estate and the slaves, sending a slave mother to New Orleans and her two sons to Memphis. The scene at the grief-stricken family’s separation is heart-rending, and the Wilks women are upset. Huck comforts himself with the knowledge that the slave family will be reunited in a week or so when the duke and the dauphin are exposed. The next morning, Huck finds Mary Jane crying in her bedroom. All her joy about the trip to England has given way to distress over the separation of the slave family. Touched, Huck unthinkingly blurts out that the family will be reunited in less than two weeks. Mary Jane, overjoyed, asks Huck to