“Persons attempting to find a moral in [this narrative] will be banished” (Twain 3). Just as his first lines in the novel, Mark Twain fills The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with his signature style of humor and irony, which makes it one of the most influential works of American literature. This controversial novel relates the story of Huck, a rebellious white boy, and Jim, a black slave. Together they run away in the pursuit of freedom down the Mississippi River. When published, the novel received

setting is established through the opening line: "How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot!" This rhetorical question exemplifies the sweetness and charm of the atmosphere. The rhetorical question, which is obviously rhetorical due to the lack of a question mark, shows that it is impossible to put into words the true serenity of the environment. On the other hand, the juxtaposition between what the land used to be with what land became, imposes a negative and gloomy mood in "The Garden of Love." Contrasting

Use of Irony in The Road Not Taken "The Road Not Taken," perhaps the most famous example of Frost’s own claims to conscious irony and "the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." Thompson documents the ironic impulse that produced the poem as Frost's "gently teasing" response to his good friend, Edward Thomas, who would in their walks together take Frost down one path and then regret not having taken a better direction. According to Thompson, Frost assumes the

The Use of Chiasmus to Highlight the Irony of Slavery in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass According to Barton and Hudson's Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms, a chiasmus is a rhetorical scheme that is "particularly effective in creating irony through the reversal of accepted truths or familiar ideas" (189). Frederick Douglass uses the chiasmus throughout his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to highlight the irony of slavery's existence in a country that

Twain’s Sense of Humour With Twain’s style of complexity in characterization and sophisticated narrative structure, Mark Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was one of the best works that he had ever written. Mark Twain’s, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is about a man by the name of Jim Smiley was a man who would bet on anything. Smiley made a frog his pet and bets a stranger that his frog, Dan’l Webster, could jump higher than any frog. When Smiley was distracted

Irony and inversion mark the central themes to As I Lay Dying. Faulkner uses these significant themes to challenge the classical quest and invert characters and events to the opposite of what readers would cfonsider normal. The basic plot of the Bundren family travelling from their home to Jefferson portrays as a pointless and destructive quest. Many readers may expect the characters to reach a goal such as finding a valuable treasure or receiving a prize at the end. But in this novel, the quest

In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” An argument that Mark Twain presents is that being over-enthusiastic, carelessness and over trusting are not virtues that a person should posses, and that one can get shrewdly outwitted as in Smiley’s case. The author uses a combination of satire, metaphors, parody, rhetoric prose, irony and dramatic deadpan humor in presenting his arguments in the supposedly simple but straightforward tale (Turco, 23). In addition, the author uses vernacular

Ironies and Paradoxes ABSTRACT: In contemporary literary culture there is a widespread belief that ironies and paradoxes are closely akin. This is due to the importance that is given to the use of language in contemporary estimations of literature. Ironies and paradoxes seem to embody the sorts of a linguistic rebellion, innovation, deviation, and play, that have throughout this century become the dominant criteria of literary value. The association of irony with paradox, and of both with literature

As Dr. Ball, a literary professor, defines Irony when there is a “collision of romantic expectations and reality” (Ball).* Later in the novella once Henry is engaged in his first battle, another example of irony becomes apparent to the reader. Although Henry stands and fights amongst his comrades for the first attack of the Confederate soldiers when the second attack comes, Henry

there is irony weaved into this tale, and it exists in different forms. There are three of several forms of irony that will be discussed in this play: tragic irony, situational irony, and verbal irony. While the irony exists in different forms, it helps to create the mood of the play. The first of these, tragic irony, is a form of dramatic irony where the character, in this case, Dr. Faustus, does or says something that, unknown to him, has a meaning on the audience. One example of tragic irony that