How Does Twain Use Satire In Huckleberry Finn

Twain satirizes religion and religious hypocrites to help draw a realistic picture of the 1840s. Twain’s mockery of religion starts in the beginning of the book and continues throughout. A good example of satire occurs when Huck goes to church with the Grangerfords: “The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works...” (Twain and Kazin, 109).The audience sees through this and think of both families as hypocrites; however,

Merriam Webster defines sentimental as an action or decision “resulting from feeling rather than reason or thought”(merriam-webster.com). Of all things that Twain satirizes, sentimentalism suffers the majority of the criticism. One such instance ensues when the King and the Duke first arrive in the aftermath of Peter Wilks’s death. The Duke and King go into Peter’s town pretending to be his brothers from England, Harvey and William. When the two read Peter’s will, they decide to give Peter’s nieces (Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanna) all of the brothers’ share of the money. The town doctor, one of the only educated men in the town and one of the only men who can see malapropisms and blunders in the King’s story, confronts Mary Jane, warning her and the sisters that the King and the Duke are not the real Harvey and William Wilks. In response, Mary Jane says that she trusts the King and the Duke more than the Doctor: “Then she put her arm around the king on one side, and Susan and the hare-lip done the same on the other. Everybody clapped their hands and stomped on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the king held up his head and smiled proud.”(Twain and Kazin, 169-170). At this point, the audience feels disgusted because we know that Mary Jane and the girls just made a bad decision by acting from emotion. Twain uses this reaction to make the readers dislike sentimentalism. Both Huck and Twain dislike when the town reacts based on emotion, and Twain subtlety makes the audience feel the same way, because we know that in the same situation, we would not act based on feeling, but based on common