Mark Twain's style

Mark Twain - A Brief Assessment 1. Mark Twain - A Brief Assessment As one of America's first foremost realists, and humorists, Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience. His achievement is his creation of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who embody the mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the model state. Mark Twain, the third of five children, was born on Nov. 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal, the mixture of idyll（田园诗; 牧歌）,where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn live in adventure-filled summers. Hannibal was dusty, and had quite large forests nearby, which Twain knew as a child and uses them in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) . The period of 1874 and 1880 was Mark Twain's most productive years as a novelist. Another of his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer came out. It was a pop​ular theme in American literature. Twain creates a highly realistic background for the story. We get to know the vil​lage very well with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which a ghost is supposed to exist. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are al​so important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. Tom is very romantic. His view of life comes from books about knights in the Middle Ages. A whistle from Huck outside Tom's window calls him out for a night of adventures. Afterwards, Tom can always return to his Aunt Polly's house. Huck has no real home. By the end of the novel, we can see Tom growing up. Soon, he will also be a part of the adult world. Huck, however, is a real outsider. Some critics complain that Twain wrote well only when he was writing about young people. They say that his psychology was really only child psychology. This may be true. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is Twain's best book because, for whatever reasons, he brought together in the book, the highest degree of artistic balance, the most fundamental dualities（二元性）running through his work and life from start to finish. In his later novels, Twain seems less hopeful about democra​cy. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the hero is the boss of a factory. He is hit on the head and wakes up in sixth-century England. Because he is a nineteenth-century in​ventor, he begins to modernize this world, and because he knows so much, he becomes a kind of dictator, called "the Boss". In many ways, Twain seems to be praising both the technology and the leadership of the bosses of American business during the Gilded（镀金） Age. Like Twain and Twain's hero, these bosses thought they knew more than the ordinary people of society. By 1890, Twain's financial fortunes were crumbling, mostly owing to his bad investment in a publishing firm and in the Paige typesetter. In 1891, Twain closed the Hartford mansion, sold the furniture, and went to Europe to economize. While he was lectur​ing in Europe, his daughter Susy died, and his wife, Livy, shortly afterward suffered a nervous collapse from which she never re​covered. Twain blamed him for bringing on his beloved family the circumstances that led to both tragedies. Twain's pessimism grew deeper and deeper. His abiding skepticism（怀疑论; 怀疑的态度）about human nature deepened to cynicism and found expression in those dark stories of his last years, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg ，and The Mysterious Stranger. Twain saw human nature as a kind of machine. He once said, "I see no great difference between a man and a watch, except that a man is conscious and a watch is not." Human evil comes from something being wrong with that machine. Throughout all of Twain's writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for money. But Twain never tried to solve the conflict. He is like a newspaperman who reports what he sees. His humor was often rather childish. This may bespeak（证明; 表 关于同志近三年现实表现材料材料类招标技术评分表图表与交易pdf视力表打印pdf用图表说话 pdf 示） why the critic P. Abel said: "Twain was ably and an old man, but never was he a man. " His literature explored questions of freedom, independence, and identity. Most of the critical attention has been given to Huck Finn, Clemens' greatest achievement. This book concerns itself with a number of themes, among them the quest for freedom, the transition from adolescence into adulthood, alienation and initiation, criticism of pre-Civil War southern life. A remarkable achievement of the book is Clemens' use of American humor, folklore, slang, and dialects. There is critical debate, however, concerning the ending of the book - some call it weak and ineffective, others feel it is appropriate and effective. 2. The Writing Styles of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain was the first important writer to consistently use the American speech rather than England’s English. His honor, whether it was aimed at pure entertainment or at social satire, was irresistible. His realism, and details influenced many of the later American novelists. That was why Ernest Hemingway once said “all modern American literatures came from one book written by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And it became Twain’s masterpiece. Huckleberry Finn is a veritable（真实的） recreation of living models. As for the style of the book, the form is based on the simplest of all novel-forms, the so-called picaresque novel, or novel of the road, which strings its incidents on the line of the hero’s travels. But, in this novel, rivers are roads that move, and the movement of the road in its own mysterious life transmutes the primitive simplicity of the form: the road itself is the greatest character in this novel of the road, and the hero’s departures from the river and his returns to it compose a subtle and significant pattern. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows us the major achievements of his art: the masterful use of dialects; humor and pathos, innocence and evil. This novel demonstrates his ability to capture the enduring, archetypal, mythic images of America and to create the most memorable characters in all of American fiction. 1) Use of Colloquial Language The book is written in a colloquial style, in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans. Moreover, the prose of Huckleberry Finn established the prose virtues of American colloquial speech. It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use of language. Most of all, it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word’s group of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice. Mark Twain’s colloquial style has influenced a large number of American writers. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn displays the major achievements of his art: the carefully controlled point of view, with its implicit ironies expressed through the voice of a semiliterate boy: the masterful use of dialects embodying humor, realism, pathos（悲怆, 同情, 怜悯; 痛苦）, innocence and evil. All of them are united for a journey down the Mississippi that serves as the mythic center of the novel. 2) Vernacular（本地话的, 方言的）Language Mark Twain wrote in his unpretentious, colloquial, and poetic style. He used vernacular language, dialect with spelling representing pronunciation. Part of this comes from his interest in humor. The directness of the language is a very influential point in Twain’s style. Ernest Hemingway in the 20th century said that he had learnt his craft from Mark Twain because if the direct speech and the direct narration that Twain was able to achieve. The hoax （恶作剧; 玩笑）and tall tale（荒诞故事）are also part of twain’s style. Hoax is writing something fantastic and pretending that it were true, much like the tall tale. It tolls as if it were true, and so the reader would laugh that anybody could believe such preposterous（前后颠倒的, 荒谬的） burlesque（滑稽戏） things. Mark Twain wanted his writing to have the sound of easy-going speech. In Huckleberry Finn, he wrote seven different dialects and each can be distinguished. If the reader is a linguist, he can examine the different pronunciations that Twain has shown. In his own time, dialect writing was considered humorous. People got a big laugh out of reading these misspell words. Another feature of the book, which helps to make it famous is its language. The book is written in the colloquial style in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans. Mark Twain’s introductory note on accents is an indication of his conscious attempt to achieve accurate detail. What is more, there is an ungrammatical element, which gives the final finish to his style. The whole book approximates the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from South American of the mid-nineteenth century. The vernacular language in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn initiated the new style of language in American novels, and has had significant influence upon American writers of later generations. 3) Local Color Local color as a trend first made its presence in the late 1860s and early seventies. The vogue of local color fiction was the logical combination of a long, progressive development. It was the outgrowth of historical and aesthetic forces that has been gathering energy since early nineteenth century. Twain refers to the elements, which characterize a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and also a particular place. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to identify and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. Twain depicted social life through descriptions of local places and people he knew best and believed that “the most valuable capital, or culture, or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience.” Yet, sometimes Twain wrote a sentimental story, not because he was sentimental, but because he wanted to show the reader how stupid such a story really was. The reader has to be very careful when he or she reads Mark Twain. Twain often played trick on the reader. He often said things when he meant just the opposite. This is the irony that he got the humor from the Far West. Mark twain preferred to respect social life through portraits of local places which he knew best and drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. The Adventures of huckleberry Finn is one such example. It is through his use of language and his activities that Twain creates character and sets down objective truth: Finn is uneducated; he dislikes civilized ways because they are restrictive and hypocritical he likes. Meanwhile, local color mixed romantic plots with realistic descriptions of things which were readily observed, with the customs, dialects, sights, smell and sounds of regional America. 4) Pun In English, paronomasia（同音异义） called pun, means being call by a different name. The exact definition is: Humorous use of word to suggest different meanings, or of words of same or similar sound has different meanings. In a certain context, pun has several pragmatic functions. Throughout all of Twain’s writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for money. But Twain never tried to solve the conflict. He is like a newspaperman who reports what he sees. In this situation, his humor was often rather childish. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we can find many words and phrases that were used vividly to describe the things that happened, such as ‘I went along slow then, and I wasn’t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I wasn’t. This sentence is very interesting; pun is used to express the author’s mood at that moment. We can also use another kind of language to replace the original, but the effect is so different. So we can conclude that pun played an important role in this novel.