Irony In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

It Is Not Funny

Humor is not always used to make people laugh; it can be used to point out how absurd a person or society is acting. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn between 1876 and 1883 and it was published in 1885, yet he set Huckleberry Finn back some thirty years before slavery was abolished in pre-Civil War Missouri. Mark Twain's use of satire in Huckleberry Finn exposes racial hypocrisy he witnessed in the American South in the mid-19th century. He writes an adventure story filled with biting humor revealing his poor opinion of how his peers treat each other. The absurdity of his characters' actions are humorous; Twain's use of irony also reveals their cruelty via Huck Finn's reflections. Twain's use of irony grossly highlights the

Miss Watson advises Huck with lessons taken from the Bible "help other people, and do everything [one] could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about (oneself)"(12). Twain has her say this, not long after she has fetched in her slaves for prayer. Twain’s use of the word "fetch" reminds one of the status the slaves on her land have: slaves are treated like property and “fetched” in like animals. Miss Watson is hypocritical because she poses as a Christian, but does not follow the value that one should treat one's neighbor as oneself. Twain does not allow his characters to get away with using religion to justify their superiority to blacks. Miss Watson represents Twain's use of irony because many people were just like her. They preached religion and yet devalued the merit of African Americans.

During the late 1800s when Twain was writing Huckleberry Finn, science was also wrongly being used to prove that African Americans were an inferior race. Many people in the South viewed African Americans as inferior and they justified their foolishness by the scientific thought called "ethnology.” The science of ethnology was a way southern

Twain's bitter commentary on this mob mentality is seen in the speech that Colonel Sherburn gives to the mob after they come to lynch him for killing Boggs. Col. Sherburn tells his fellow men they are weak and have no courage: "The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man....The pitifullest thing out there is a mob; that's what an army is - a mob.; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness"(134). Twain uses Sherburn's speech to reach out to his readers, Twain's message comes through Col. Sherburn strongly. Do not allow a mob to influence your actions, have courage to have your own moral code. Twain wants them to be like Huck and not to be swayed by just popular opinion if they know that what they are told to believe is wrong. Twain's white characters mirror all the people in Twain's own community, they range from the poor and uneducated to the wealthy, educated land owners, and none question the societal belief that slavery is wrong. Pap represents the racist ignorant people in society and as Twain points out through Col. Sherburn's speech, there are too many of these ignorant people. Pap falsely