Huckleberry Finn Essays

Huckleberry Finn is an interesting book covering the adventures of a teenager who is free of social prejudices and sees the world with the widely open eyes. Huck does not care about the opinion of others and he treats all people as equals. Writing Huckleberry essays you should pay attention to the themes raised in the book, to the role played by other characters in the story, style of writing and all other important details. The following custom essay samples is professionally written. You may read it to gain a better insight into the novel. If you would like to take advantage of individual essay writing service, do not hesitate to request essay writing help at our site. We are devoted to providing high quality writing and we strive for superior customer service. Our custom essay services are inexpensive and we do not neglect your requests.

Huckleberry Finn Essays Sample

Consider "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", the novel in which Mark Twain's qualities achieved their greatest harmony. In Chapter XXII, Huck goes to a circus and reports his awe of ladies in spangles and "rose-leafy dresses flapping soft and silky", his delight in bareback riding, and finally his great interest in a drunken stranger who ultimately proves to be the best rider of them all. The scene is firmly set in the tradition of humor. One at once remembers Partridge at Garrick's performance of Hamlet; but the reference is more direct than that. The rustic who mistakes a play for reality had already appeared in the Snodgrass letters and had worked into them from a stock theme in frontier humor. The three volumes of Sol Smith's recollections, a great part of which appeared as sketches in the Spirit of the Times and elsewhere, have many examples of this situation. Mark was well acquainted with Sol Smith's material, but in this instance was reproducing as a scene which had elsewhere derived from Smith. "Major Jones' Chronicles of Pineville", one of William Tappan Thompson's immensely popular collections, contains a sketch, "The Great Attraction", which tells how a circus comes to Pineville. The scene in "Huckleberry Finn" rests solidly on Thompson's. . . . In the preceding chapter, the Duke of Bilgewater coaches Louis XVII in Hamlet's soliloquy and then composes a playbill. Both of these items are widespread in the humor of the time. One of the playbill's numerous begetters may be seen in "The Drama in Pokerville." Mutilations of Shakespeare can be met with everywhere in this literature but most often and most amusingly in the anecdotal recollections of Sol Smith.

But the most important reproduction in "Huckleberry Finn" occurs in Chapter XX, when the raft ties up at Pokeville, "a little one-horse town about three mile down the bend." The scene at the camp meeting is one of the book's climactic passages. A dispassionate pronouncement on the damned human race is implicit in this tale of backwoods hysteria and boozy repentance. It presents the squatter in a cold light that is barren of the emotion which, in our day, has been expended in denouncing him and the effect is as complete as any achievement in American literature. But also the scene provides an instance of Mark Twain's literary judgment betrayed into error. Here, as in so many other places, his imagination -- or his discretion -- goes wrong and forces him out of realism, out of satire even, into extravaganza.