Analysis Of Realism And The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

2320 Words5 Pages

2013530887
Zora Wei
American Literature and Composition
Christina Davis
Oct, 15, 2015
Realism and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Both Mark Twain an Thomas Pynchon went about displaying the errors of society in their books The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Entropy. However they displayed the errors of society differently. Both of them writes in realistic style, which is a literary style that gives audience the impression of recording or reflecting faithfully an actual way of life. In realistic works, authors always describe characters’ actions, emotions and speech and surroundings characters live by in a “verisimilitude” of detail derived from observation. Characters in realistic works can not be perfectly good or completely evil, since …show more content…

This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. Thus his boyhood experience on the Mississippi valley provides rich material for his writing to illuminate contemporary society. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is a typically immensely realistic novel, reflecting the real and terrible life of Mississippi people through a 14-year old boy’s experience. Mark Twain directly depicts the misery and sufferings of the common people in 1820s in order to criticize the contemporary corrupted society in this novel. We could see realistic characteristics in almost every aspect of his writing, including how he describes the river and nature as real observations, how he depicts the behavior and speech of …show more content…

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thus shows the use of proper diction that fits the characters, time period and location. Moreover, the dialects are not only realistic in grammar and word choice, but also realistic in the characters that display them. Different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently. Characters who are lower class and less educated, such as Jim the slave, speaks with more slang, colloquial and direct words, or improper grammar; "Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin"(Mark Twain, Page 111). However, characters that are upper class and are well-educated, such as Miss Watson, speak more properly with no colloquial terms. The local unique characteristics are also illustrated in this novel, since the diction matches that of the south with such popular expressions as "dog my cats" and "by and by"

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