Examples Of Satire In Huckleberry Finn

“Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed.” (Carl Hiaasen) Mark Twain uses the literary device known as satire in the classic novel,  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to expose the irrational views of society during the time of slavery, through humor. Huck exclaiming that he does not want to go back to live with Widow Douglass, Jim explaining how those who have less cherish their belonging more than those who have more, and the cruelty of the white men toward Jim, show how Mark Twain was showing the ugly side of society to the readers with the use of satire and irony. Society in Huckleberry Finn not only outcasted people because of the color of their skin,

but also because of how they chose to view life.

From the first pages of the novel, it is made evident that Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of the story, is a realist. He tends to look at life in the form of cause and effect, but life is not always that way. For example, he did not see the point in praying, if he could not get everything he prayed for in life. He was however, a child, which meant that his imagination was still very active. He loved to escape into nature, and live the life of a bandit along with Tom Sawyer. He felt that civilization did not have anything to offer him, as he was generally uninterested in its ideas. This is why he did not want to go back to the Widow. “This shook me up considerable, because I didn’t want to go back to the widow’s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.  Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he

could think of, and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn’t skipped any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn’t know the names of, and so called them what’s-his-name when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing.” (Twain 93) For a kid like Huck Finn, the real world outside of civilization was more his style, because their are less rules, and people are not conformed to live a certain way. This is funny, because it is implying that Huck is like an adult, despite having played along with Tom Sawyer a couple chapters before. It is also funny, because Society tends to pressure ideas on children, and Huck acknowledged that, but decided that he was not going to go along with it.
Mark Twain poked fun at society differently through Jim, because it was from the point of view of a slave. “Blame de point!  I reck’n I knows what I knows.  En mine you, de real pint is down furder—it’s down deeper.  It lays in de way Sollermun was raised.  You take a man dat’s got on’y one or two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o’ chillen?  No, he ain’t; he can’t ‘ford it.  He know how to value ‘em.  But you take a man dat’s got ‘bout five million chillen runnin’ roun’ de house, en it’s diffunt.  He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey’s plenty mo’.  A chile er two, mo’ er less, warn’t no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him!” (Twain 274) The reader is able to see that Jim saw the irony in the poor not being wasteful, but the rich, even though the have more things to take care of, do not have the same level of care they do for what is theirs. It is funny that someone that is not deemed intelligent by society, is able to see the faults and flaws that society actually has. Jim is a slave, and from his point of view, resources are crucial for him. For him to have to live with people who do not have the same care for things as he does, and yet still be financially secure, must drive him insane. This is most likely why he decided to rant on the subject.
Again and again, Jim’s human qualities are intensified in order to emphasise that he is indeed human.

In order to convince the audience that Jim is human, Twain has Jim prove himself more compassionate than white men. “They cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him a cuff or two side the head once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on him, and chained him again, ...” (Twain 971) Irony can be found in this situation, as a black man spared himself for a white boy, while the other white men beat him horribly. It is even more ironic, because the white men were beating Jim, because they did not consider him human, as white men did not consider black people to be but he was actually showing more human qualities than them at this point in the novel. It is not hilarious, but it does present an interesting case of irony, which is a type of humor in

literature.