Mark Twain's use of language and dialect in the
book
"Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn" helped him to bring about the
overall feel that
he conveyed throughout the book, allowing him to
show Huck Finn's
attitudes and beliefs concerning the nature of
education,
slavery, and family values.
When the story begins, Huck is seen as a young
boy who
is not very
educated nor wishes to be. He does not seem to care very
much for the
attention that is given to him by the Widow Douglas,
who had taken him
in for her son, and her sister, Miss Watson.
Huck's moral
values were not only the product of his ignorance, but
there is relation
seen between Huck's attitude and the attitude of his
father when Huck
is confronted by him. Huck's father is disgusted at
the way that Huck
seems to be becoming more and more civilized.
He states
"...they say you can read and write. You think you're
better'n your
father, now, don't you, because he can't?" Perhaps this
statement shows
disgust in Huck through not following the moral
values of his
father, or perhaps this is just merely jealousy on his
father's part.
Huck's father warns Huck about going to school any
more, yet Huck
goes anyway, showing great willpower in the
character of Huck
in that he was gaining an education that he never
really wanted in
the first place, but soon came to realize that it was
something
actually useful, and in the fact that he was disobeying his
father's orders.
Huck's feelings about slavery are shown when he
helps
Jim, Miss
Watson's slave, to escape. Huck's constant statement that
"Jim talks
like he is white inside" shows that Huck was unique
amongst the
society in which he lived in the fact that he saw beneath
the color of a
person's skin and saw the person that was truly there.
Jim seems to be
the only person that Huck can trust other than Tom
Saywer, Huck's
best friend. Huck Finn felt that slavery was a cruel
injustice because
he had gotten to know Jim and found out that there
was more to him
than just being a slave. Huck had found that Jim
was a human being
just like himself. Through these ideas, Mark
Twain subtly
conveyed his own feelings about slavery that existed in
the south by
using Huck as an example.
Mark Twain not only challenged the topics of
education
and slavery, but
he also criticized the very society in which he lived.
Social criticism
appears in Twain's picture of the feuding
Grangerfords and
Shepherdsons, two families upon which Huck
stumbles while on
his travels. The two families show the
foolheartedness
of the pre-civil war society that existed in Twain's
lifetime. Twain
tried to convey the point that society had no need for
civil feuds such
as the one illustrated, or even the American civil
war.
Through Mark Twain's use of language, he
succeeded in showing the
thoughts and
beliefs of Huck Finn and the world that surrounded him. He
accomplished this
by showing these beliefs through Huck's
realistic attitude,
creating the
framework to tackle the then-present and
controversial issues of
slavery and
nationalistic values that accompanied peoples' thoughts on the subject.
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