7)Vernacular and Satire with regards to the Theme of Huckleberry Finn.
Actual Letter:Hi, I wrote
you about a week ago. Don't know if the message got through.But,
I was hopeing to get some ideas from you on vernacular, satire,
and
the theme in Huck Finn. It's for a class asignment. I've read the
book, but I can't think of specific examples from the book to
support
that Mark Twain used these elements in the book. Could one of the
themes be, man's inhumanity to man? Need help soon!!!
Answer Given:I'm not
quite sure whether you want to focus on one of the three
vernacular, satire or theme, or need something that has all three
in it. Anyways, the best I could do, is set the theme, and use
twain's use of vernacular and Satire to back up the theme.
Anyways, the theme I used in my overview on my page is that Twain
believes that a simple wilderness life is better then the
hypocritical life of the southern society. Allright, that's quite
a mouthful, so i'll break it down a bit. Twain thinks the society
is hypocritical, which means that society either does exactly
what it says it shouldn't do, or doesn't do what it says it
should do. This means that we need to find examples of this. One
example is at the morning sermon with the shepardsons and
grangerfords, the preacher talks about brotherly love, while both
families have guns in their hands. Also during the fued section,
Twain takes a satirical look at poetry when Huck and ma and Pa
grangerford are looking at emmeline's poetry, and think it's the
best stuff ever written, even though it's just awful in every
respect.
Another shot at religion that twain makes, is somewhere, Mrs
Watson, or one of huck's gaurdians who was very religious starts
trying to convert Huck, but it turns out that Huck would rather
go to Hell then to be in heavan with "the likes of those
people"
Satire is pretty much everywhere in that Novel, in the Duke and
Dauphin scene, when they have a play, they can only get people
when they prohibit women and children form seeing the play. Also,
when the two slave catchers are coming to get Jim, and Huck
trickes them away from the boat by saying that his
"father" has small pox.
I'm not quite sure how Vernacular ties into the theme though. The
whole book is filled with the southern vernacular of that time,
as well as the "slave" vernacular and a little bit on
the british vernacular. Some scenes you may want to use are when
Huck and Jim are discussing King Soloman, and how he wasn't wise
for slicing a baby in half (also satircal in a sense) or early in
the book, when jim breaks out with his magic hairball to tell the
future. Also, when the Duke and Dauphin take up english accents
to try and fool the wilks.
As far as Man's inhumanity to Man, taking that from a satirical
stand point seems kinda tough. One scene comes to mind, when
somebody (I think Mrs. Watson) ask huck if anybody was killed in
the boat wreck, huck replies with "no mam, just a
nigger" or something like that. The implication here is that
(I remember the person asking was deeply religious) a religious
person is supposed to love all humans equally, and then when a
black dies, it becomes just, oh, darn, big deal.
Well, that's about all I can think of at the moment... Good luck
on the paper...
oh, and the summary I broke down into locations, and then put the
chapters on the summary spot, so that Might help you locate the
sections the quotes might be at.... nyways, hope that helps...!