Mark Twain's realism and local color in Huckleberry Finn

Local Color and Realism

The realism of Mark Twain fully reveals in the novel "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn," in novel, which is familiar to many of us since high school classes of literature, but which has a deeper psychological and moral meaning, as its message expands over the limits of an adventure story for teenagers. The events described in the book show the whole encyclopedia of Southern life in the middle of the nineteenth century in a very realistic and ironic way.

On the example of Huck's and Jim's journey on the raft down Mississippi River, Mark Twain succeeded to show on the particular examples of different events that happened in their life during journey the conflict of an individual and society, slavery and racism issues, "civilized society" with its bigotry, religious and philistine prejudices, as well as problem of education, common sense and conservatism in people's minds.

The novel in general, gives a true picture of "local color" in Southern province, narrow-minded common people, and their views on society, liberties and equalities. Description of particular characters who were typical for that epoch gives us a full view about the moods that were common for particular social groups. The words of Huck's Pup about slavery and equality not only reflect Southern dialect but are the embodiment of rednecks ideology in general: "Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful-There was a free nigger there, from Ohio-they said he was a p-fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain-t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home-they told me there was a State in this country where they-d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I-ll never vote agin (Mark Twain, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p.20)." Huck, a teen boy of 14 has to solve a very uneasy moral and ethical question: to admit Jim being his friend and being a human, not a slave, or return him back to slavery. He faces social prejudices, social norms and survivals that were taken into his head and on the other side he observes another world dictated by his deep common sense and objectivism. If for him the journey down Mississippi is an escape from moral slavery of "educated society," then for Jim it's a matter of life and death. Another realistic feature bases in the plot of the story, is that neither Jim nor Huck had any specific aspirations to escape, it wasn't dictated by their personal ambitions or profits, but by the natural aspiration for freedom and general desire to be independent.