Diction In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

There are many things that occur within our lifetimes that some people will never encounter. There is one common chain of events that occur- we are born, we live and we die.

This is the inevitable truth which some contemplate every day. Death for many is something they don’t want to think about, however some people embrace it and think about death in a different perspective. Two major sources that would support this claim are The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn by Mark Twain and th e poem I Am Vertical by Sylvia Plath. Through the works of both texts, they reveal that the concept death is significant by using diction and syntax.

Syntax is a common literary device which is included in every form of writing, in the case of this essay it’s two globally recognized texts which

One sentence that really stands out is “Thoughts gone dim. It's more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation.” This sentence alone provides the reader a very good idea of how death, in this case, is not something that should be considered

“dark” and “scary”.

Mark Twain uses diction, a literary device which focuses on word choices, in The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to show the complete disbalance and racial war between

African American people living in the south and white people in the south. Every character in the novel has a very distinctive way of speaking and how they share their ideas. Especially in the time period when the novel was written, the word usage, punctuation and overall meaning of some word(s) could be different compared to how the words are used in the 21st century. In more than one, instance it was shown that many words are being repeated such as “Bang!”,

“Kill” and “guns”. One common meaning all these words have is something to do with death. No matter how one looks at these words, there will always be something that “screams” negativity when these words are said and this is one thing that Twain wanted to show- how death