马克吐温写作风格鉴赏(An Analysis of the Writing Styles of Mark Twain)英文版全文

An Analysis of the Writing Styles of Mark Twain

His colloquial Language and Satire in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I. The Background of Mark Twain

1.1 Mark Twain and His Experience

Mark Twain, pseudorym of Samuel langhone Clemens, was brought up in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, near the Mississippi River. He was twelve when his father diod and he had to leave school. He was successively a printer’s apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California. This knocking about gave him a wide knowledge of humanity. As one of America’s first and foremost realists and humorists, Mark Twain usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience. His life spanned the two Americas, the frontier America and the emerging urban, industrial giant of the twenty-century.

As a witness of the civil war, Twain saw clearly the great changes in nation’s economic development and political life. With the final victory over the South the North once again enjoyed its wielding power in the nation’s administration. Now the acute conflict at home was undermined and the American people again focused their full attention on re-construction after the war. Because most majority of the slaves were emancipated, the slave-based economy of the defeated South had its prosperity became rootless. In this case, clusters of groundless southern poor whites and the newly freed slaves headed directly of indirectly for the new-liberated cities to seek opportunities. It may be called the ‘Gold Rush’ rejuvenated, or rather, it was so-called the ‘American Dream’ by some critics. Twain also could not help rushing to the west to will his American dream. He once believed the idea of development and industrialization since it would modernize the young country and encourage the enterprising spirit of the American who had long been famous for it. He was firmly enthralled by such fever, so once again he held an optimistic attitude towards the post-westward expansion. He drew much inspiration from the unparalleled and magnificent event and spoke highly of its decision-makers and its people.

1.2 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The best work that Mark Twain ever produced is, as we noted earlier on, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It tells a story about the United States before the Civil War, around 1850, when the great Mississippi Valley was still being settled. Here lies an America, with its great national faults, full of violence and even cruelty, yet still retaining the virtues of ‘some simplicity, some innocence, and some peace.’ The story takes place along the Mississippi River, on both sides of which there was unpopulated wilderness and a dense forest. It relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and, more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with him and helping him as best he could, changes his mind, his prejudice about black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well.

At the heart of Twain’s achievement is his creation of Huck Finn, who embodies that mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the modern super state.

1.3 A General Introduction to the Mississippi

The Mississippi is not only Mark Twain’s life stage but also American society’s stage. It flows through the middle of America; it’s one of the greatest rivers in the world. In Twain’s early years, the geographic core was the great valley of the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi is the main ar tery of transportation on the young nation’s heart. In 1857, young Mark Twain entered that