Slavery and Racism in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Stylistic Study

Abstract

Slavery and racism have been the major issues of the antebellum American South and their legacies continue to exist even after the abolition of slavery. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the themes of slavery and racism in one of the America‘s greatest classics The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain. We use the stylistic approach and the theory of narratology to identify the themes under study. The former is chosen to examine the writer‘s style and language in order to clarify his standpoint. The latter is used to analyze the characters‘ speech and actions. Thus, with these two theories, we conducted a descriptive analytical research to investigate the themes of slavery and racism. Our research paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces stylistics and its literary analysis. The second chapter deals with slavery and racism in the American literary realism. The third chapter is devoted to the literary analyses of the themes of slavery and racism in Mark Twain‘s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The study has come to the following results. First, it is proved that the themes of slavery and racism are portrayed through the characters‘ language and actions. Second, it proves the writer‘s antiracist attitude towards slaves as he asserts the humanity of blacks.