Word: twain
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...convince Huck of the benefits of Christianity, asserts that Tom Sawyer won’t be going to Heaven, Huck quips that he is glad he won’t go to Heaven “because I wanted [Tom Sawyer] and me to be together.” Twain extends Huck’s naiveté even further when Huck fails to understand that Tom’s fantasy games are not real. In one scene Huck believes that a traveling troupe of invisible Arabs with two hundred elephants was conjured by a genie. It is only after...
...naïve narrator is a recurring trope in comic novels, which allows the author to objectively examine the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of society through the eyes of a figure who is not burdened by social preconceptions. But Twain conveniently adapts a narrator with a flexible naiveté, who can alternatively be ignorant of society’s sins and also knowingly participate in them. The consistently shifting innocence of Huck’s personality heightens the comedy throughout the novel, but also sacrifices the some of its substance...
...brink of being sold back into slavery. Miraculously, Jim is saved when Tom reveals that the whole escape plan was an elaborate game—Jim was already freed by his mistress on her deathbed. Some critics have criticized this ending as an evasion that allows Twain to avoid dealing with the evils of slavery, while others have defended the scene as a burlesque satire that serves as an appropriate conclusion for a picaresque novel. But disregarding this critical debate, the ending serves as the ultimate example of Twain’s tendency to sacrifice substance for satire. The deeper...
...smart and less neurotic than Californians. The social life at Tulane was splendid. "I was a drunk," says Breitbart, who estimates he spent five nights a week at New Orleans bars with fellow Delta Tau Delta fraternity members. The classroom experience was less satisfying. "I didn't read Mark Twain," he says. "I read critical theorists. I graduated with a degree in nihilism and nothingness...
...Ohio and Mississippi rivers, in the heart of a region called Little Egypt for the resemblance it bears to the flat, loamy landscape of the Nile River Delta. Charles Dickens, after a visit in 1842, dubbed Cairo a "dismal swamp ... uncheered by any gleam of promise," although Mark Twain rehabilitated its image 40 years later, making it the destination of Huck and Jim's river voyage in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At its 1920s peak, Cairo was a boomtown of 15,000 people. But as river trade declined, so did Cairo. In the 1960s and '70s, the town was engulfed...