download the new version for android The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In reading Huckleberry Finn, it is difficult to set aside the hypocrisy of Twain’s sociological satire, regardless that the satire is logical in its arguments. He had been posted in Nevada in 1865 as a ‘legitimately dishonored man’” (Schmitz). In 1884, arguably his best year as a writer, Mark Twain feels himself everywhere challenged, his loyalty questioned, his identity suspect. He is writing the letter that would betray Jim, the letter that denounces Jim as a fugitive slave. At the same moment, elsewhere in Mark Twain’s life, differently challenged, Huckleberry Finn is asking himself the same question.

He is daring to vote for Grover Cleveland, the Democratic presidential candidate. “Am I ‘a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man?’ Mark Twain wonders in 1884, addressing the Hartford Monday Evening Club.

Furthermore, Twain was objectively guilty of breaking a myriad of laws across several states, but he managed to squirm his way out of legal responsibilities by figuratively barricading himself in New England. The overt irony of Mark Twain’s social commentary about the South is that he was considered by many people in the South to be a traitor, a consequence of having deserted his military post during the Civil War.

His novel-based satirical attack on society pulled no punches and assaulted the dogmas of racism, religion, education, and tradition. In his most famous novel, Huckleberry Finn, Twain used satire to expose the soft, sociological underbelly of American society, often with humor but also with irony, tragedy, and redemption. As a war deserter, Twain was certainly aware that the pen can be mightier than the sword when wielded correctly. The brilliance of Mark Twain is that he used his postbellum celebrity and extraordinary talent as a writer to weaponize satire and attack deeply entrenched politics and societal issues of mid-nineteenth century America.

Download the new version for android The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn