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 TwainHis colloquial Language and Satire in the Adventures of Huckleberry FinnI. The Background of Mark Twain1.1 Mark Twain and His ExperienceMark 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 FinnThe 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 MississippiThe 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 thatworld as a cub pilot on a steamboat. Later, when he wented to write something, this land provided him with many plentiful writing materials.II. Analyzing Two Writing Styles of Mark Twain (in 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 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. Mark Twain’s three years’ life on that returned to the Mississippi left such a fond memory with him that returned to the theme more than once in his writing career. Huckleberry Finn is a veritable recreation of living models, and is H uck’s book, not Jim’s. The two major characters, Huck and Jim, represent the two sides of the dilemma: Huck strikes out for an absolute freedom, while Jim requires, in order to gain his own freedom, that Huck qualify his freedom by entering into the pursui t of Jim’s. It starts out as a comedy , an ‘As You Like It’ with a hero drawn from the bottom of society rather than the top. Huck and his father, Jim, the swindlers(the Duke and the Dauphin), colonel sherburn and the drunkard Boggy-all these characters prototypes in real life. The portrayal of individual incidents and characters achieved intense verisimilitude of detail. Serious problems are being discussed through the narration of a little illiterate boy. The fact that the wilderness juxtaposed with civilization, the people half wild and half civilized, many of whom are worse, vulgar, are brutal. 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 from: the road itself is the greatest character in this novel of the r oad, 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.2.1 Use of Colloquial LanguageThe 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: the felicitous balancing of nostalgic humorist and realism, humor and pathos, innocence and evil, all united for a journey down the Mississippi that serves as the mythic center of the novel. 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.2.1.1 Vernacular LanguageMark 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 inhumor. 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 and tall tale 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 any body could believe such preposterous things, the burlesque making fun of establishes ways of writing.Mark Twain said, “I amend dialect stuff by talking and talking it till it sounds right.” He wanted his writing to have the sound of easy-going speech. In Huckleberry Finn the fountainhead of the American colloquial prose, 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. “In this book,” he says, “a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extreme forms of the backwoods southwestern d ialect; the ordinary ‘pike country’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity, with t hese several forms of speech.” “Painstaking ” and “not haphazard,” though they possess a humorous ring, denote the conscientious effort on the part of the author, and trustworthiness and familiarity and the author’s awareness of dialects in using which rev eal his attempt to reproduce actual daily speech with a degree of accuracy. A recent and very influential recasting of Huck’s vernacular voice has identified. We may quote a passage from this masterpiece as an illustration:“I took the sack of corn me al and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old son and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot/ I took fish lines and matches and other things- everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place I wanted an ax, but there wa sn’t any, only the one out at woodpile, and I know why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.”The words used here are, perhaps “ammunition” which is etymologically French, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, and are short, concrete and direct in effect. Sentence structures are most of them simple or compound, with a series of “then” and “ands” and semi-colons serving as connectives. The repetition of the word “took” and the stringing together of things leave the impression that Mark Twain depend solely on the concrete object and action for the body and movement of his prose. 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.2.1.2 Local ColorLocal color as a trend first made its presence in the late 1860s and early seventies. The vogue oflocal color fiction was, the logical combination of a long, progressive development. It was the outgrowth of historical and aesthetic forces that 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. He would do things that he did just to make fun , but the reader might think that he really meant it. Then the reader was the tender-foot who taken in .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. Finn is living breathing personality. 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. After the Civil war, local color had further developed, In this book, this kind of literature mainly describes the local life, the keynote was optimistic, and the language was narrative humorous. The char acters he created were humorous and full of wittiness. Mark Twin’s work was regarded the witness of America’s pure local life. According to Calkins, “Few American writers have written the same after reading telling.” From my point of view, American literat ure is so charming for this kind of works.Local color became dominate in American Literature(1860-1870). One of the most important writing features of Mark Twain is the use of Local colorism. It is also impossible in the Mississippi River towns through which Huck and Jim journey to imagine being a hero .This in turn makes Sherborn a cold-blooded killer and Huck a saint (and Tom a good). Let me repeat it as a saint，however, Huck is no more bent on social reform, no more optimistic about it, than is sherburn. So local colorism is a variation of American realism, and also a description of a small refined region. Twain, breaking out of the narrow limits of local-color fiction, described the breadth of American experience as no one had ever done before, or since, and he created The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of American realism that proverbs to be one of the great books of world literature.2.1.3 PunIn English paronomasia called pun, means 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. There are five forms of pun: homophonic pun, paranomasic, antalaclasis, sylletic pun, asteismus. 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. This may bespeak why the critic P. Abel said:” Twain was a boy and an old man, but never was he a man.”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.2.2 Satire in The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnSatire is a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way to show that they have faults or are wrong, or a piece of writing or play, which uses this style. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain shows satire on southern culture before the civil war, when the Mississippi valley was still being settled. Twain blended two different subjects, the experience of westward expansion and the experience of southern slavery. And he wrote about both regains of the country. His attitudes toward the south were much less pleasant than his attitudes toward the west, because he confronted the south problem of slave of mistreatment of humans by humans. Through the change of the white boy Huck’s attitude toward Jim, a runaway black slave, Twain condemned racial discrimination. Twain made fun of typical American values, yet underneath he felt a brooding pessimism not only about American valuable but also about life itself. It was a dreadful thing to see Human beings be awful cruel to one another. Due to Twain’s own experience, satire is successfully used in this novel. There’s one sign ificant scene which should be remembered, Huck Finn witnesses many instances of cruelty, brutality and hypocrisy in the township along the river Here are four points about his satire in this novel.2.2.1 VanityVanity in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a perfect embodiment. Twain viewed the poor whites and showed the reader how these no-count whites thought they were better than black slaves. Many share-coppers just able to make enough money to live for these sorts of illusions. Vanity was the only thing that kept them above the slaves. Their standard of living in many cases was beneath that of slaves. The only thing that made them feel good about themselves was that they were white. And Twain made the reader laugh at the ludicrous idea that they were held. For Huck Finn, the journey on the raft with Jim was a voyage of moral discovery. At the early stage, Huck Finn looks upon Jim as a Negro slave with a common attitude. However, as they progress down the river, he changes his mind and no longer has prejudice against black people. He gradually comes to see Jim as a human being and begins to accept him as his friend. Yet Huck Finn never fully succeeds in breaking free from the prevailing attitude towards Negroes. As for this part, it’s a large contra st to the other people. Huck Finn rebels against the atrocious king and duke. He is disgusted with their trifling with human beings. It is because that Huck Finn is such a good and noble person that his moral dilemma in helping a Negro slave to escape constitutes a profound condemnation of the way of life and moral values of American south. His conscience has been formed by the morality of St. Petersburg and he never quite succeeds in freeing himself from that society’s corrupt standards. Huck Finn’s formed conscience is the measure of the moral corruption of the community that shaped. So he sinks into an inner struggle. He becomes increasingly caught between his friendship with Jim and the common social standards. Compare with others, Huck Finn’s goodness i s always unconscious and spontaneous, arising out of thedeepest recesses of his nature. He abuse cares about the welfare of others and cannot bear to see anyone suffer. He shows sympathy for the nicest of Peter Wilks and saves money for them. So the opposite character embodies vanity has come into the stage. However, humor could no more be found in Twain’s biter works. On the contrary, it was replaced by bitter satire, and vanity is an embodiment of Twain’s satire.2.2.2 Unquestioning Acceptance of ViolenceThe second object of satire is the genteel upper-class southerner. The genteel upper-class southerners don’t understand themselves, either. They lived a aristocratic life. In the novel, Granger fords are violent and hateful toward other people. Out of senseless perversion of a code of “honor”, they are involved in a feud, one that has been going on for generations with the shepherd sons. Its cause has been forgotten. Every Sunday, the shepherd sons and the Grange fords go to the same church. The shepherd sons sit on one side of their guns against the wall. And they listen to the preacher talk about brotherly love. When the sermon is over, they pick up their guns and they keep an eye on each other as they walk out the door so they will not get shot in the back. The satire is merciless, not only because these people are violent, but because they accept their violence as right. No one wants to reform. Huck keeps asking “Why?” It is just the way life is. This unquestioning acceptance of violence is the reason why Twain condemned southern society. The destruction and tyranny of Huck Finn’s father are other reasons for his escaping and desiring to be free. Huck Finn’s father is a part of that society with Huck Finn’s wishes. In contract to Miss Watson’s hypocr isy, his father presents the brutality and severity of civilization that threaten to destroy Huck Finn. His father believes that money and education are all the things of that time. Huck didn’t accept the violence from his father. Huck Finn’s freedom is mo dified by the presence of his father’s actions. Living in the woods, his father beats him quite frequently and sometimes leaves him locked up in the cabin for a long time. Once when his father returns from town, he is so drunk that he almost kills him. Huck Finn is mature enough to recognize the danger and only when he becomes convinced that his father represents immediate threat to his life does he decide to escape. Throughout his life plans to escape Huck Finn is more concerned for his life than anything else and prefers simply to disappear and begin a new life. Huck Finn’s desire to be free, at it’s deepest levels, and explores the possibility of an individual achieving true freedom in society. He is constantly forced to flee from a civilized society in order to preserve his sense of integrity and identity. It’s only when he is on the river in the group with Jim that flees secure and nature. Having escaped from the feud, he remarks that there is no home like raft and other places seem to be cramped up and smothery but a raft is. And he feels free and easy and comfortable very much on a raft. It is striking that whenever, Huck Finn comes into contact with the people along the river he is forced to assume a false identity. His initial escapes from his own cruel father and the society of St. Perterburry forces him to feign his own death. Brian Donnelly argues that Huck Finn’s true life could only be achieved by dying in the eyes of the people and by escaping down the Mississippi River. This is the way that Huck chose to the problem: violence.2.2.3 CowardThe violence on which southern culture rests is a pretence or illusion to disguise the basic cowardliness of the people and their refusal to act as individuals. Twain felt it even more deeply. People are vi olent, in Twain’s view, because they are cowards. Things are all mixed up in southern society, in any society, based on violence. It is a society without a leader. Twain’s attack on these people is bitter. In the middle part of this novel, the king and the duke were seriously evil; indeed,the long wilks episode is not funny. Had a lawyer Levi Bell, a precursor of Puddn’s head Wilson, not intervened, the outcome would have been dark in the measure of sherburn; in sherburn’s world there are no good people to be ruined. In Wilkses’ world, however, the good people are so powerless as the coward in Brecksville. The hopeless lambs offer no hope of betterment; they only measure its absence. Huck and Jim had left St. Petersburg with high hopes of freedom that are badly set back at cairo. The Willks episode ends in the utter defeat of these hopes. There seems to be no way to escape the duke and the king, the rest we have already discussed. Jim’s captivity is paralleled by Huck’s in thrall to Tom. It is on the very ve rge of the collapse of all possibility of freedom that Huck places his highest bid for it. Indeed, Jim has already been recaptures when Huck finds himself at last making the decision Twain had not been able to make at Cairo: “It was a close place,” he realizes, “I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knew it. I study a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:’ All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’” Let us say the obvious: Twain has chosen the route of social engagement when it’s too late in the story to take it. Huck has decided when he is willing to go to hell, but the harder decision was whether to go to Ohio. All in all, Huck is not a coward, those people who want to use violence to attack others can be called coward. During that years, the whole American society upheavaled strongly, and this novel deeply depicted the experience of this kind of person, under Mark Twain’s writing, coward is so vivid to embody the features of that age. We can pay more attention on sherburn, a merchant and a military man, a double pillar of society—but in a society that does not deserve to be supported. On the contrary, it merits being brought crashing down, for all the reasons Huck has been exposing through the incidents of his journey. This is not a deformable society; one can only curse it and leave. Sherburn curse it and stays, and Twain finds himself approving the cursing and not knowing what to think of the staying. Does he see something of his own situation in Sherburn furious isolation among idiots and knaves? Sherburn, moreover, is not merely an inhabitant of society; as storekeeper and military man, he is presuming ably one of those who shape it. In Huck, Twain depicts on the contrary someone who has no power at all. Homeless and no money soon became an orphan. The real questions were not whether he will leave society but whether he will enter it and to what end? From his onto logical distance, Huck looks at the world of men with natural detachment. At his most critical he feels “ashamed of the human race”. Instead, sherburn sets about shaming the damned human race, hating its inescapable presence. The murder of Boggs, who is the lowest representation of humanity in sherburn’s eyes, expresses that hatred: he tells Boggs to be gone, but Boggs stays and sherburn can’t stand his presence another moment. What sherburn cannot do is himself leave, so as to be, like Huck, peacefully and even compassionately ashamed of the human race—away from it.2.2.4 SlaveAfter reading this novel, this book has been brought to my attention by a surprising assortment of people: blacks and whites. At that time, blacks played a role of slave. The common element in this encounter has not been the kind of people making statements, nor shared opinions or political perspectives, nor even their assessments of the article. Rather, they have been united by a virtually uniform structure in their narratives, suggesting an odd sort of sub-genre. Sometimes these persons report their own experience of reading the essay, and sometimes they describe the experience of one of their students. The reader likes the essay but feels troubled about this, not knowing whether the author is black. Uneducated black slave named Jim, the book relates thestory of the escape of Jim from slavery and, more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with him and helping him as best as 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. Meanwhile, Jim is very kindhearted. All of Huck’s virtues come from his good heart and his sense of humanity, for most of the things he was taught turned out to be wrong; for example, he was taught that slavery was good and right, and that runaway slaves should be reported, so what Huck has got to do is to cut through social prejudices and social discriminations to find truth for himself. Huck starts by believing that blacks are by nature lower than whites-inferior animals of sorts in fact. Through their escape down the river, he gets to know Jim better and becomes more and more convinced that he is not only a man, but also a good man. Thus he ends up by accepting him not merely as a human being but also as a loyal friend.2.3 A Combination of Colloquial Language and SatireTo sum up, fundamentally, Twain is a great American writer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an outstanding novel; one of the most successful writing styles is a combination of colloquial language and satire. In fact, most of Twai n’s works are the combination of both colloquial language and satire, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a case in point. On the other hand, it is his masterpiece as a humorist while the novel also can be eyed as a satire on sentimentality and Romanticism on the other. We have ever seen colloquial language and satire in some works, but no one’s writing is so appropriate like Twain’s. It displays American culture out of the ordinary and the attitude toward the entire society. In this book, the author use the first character to narrate, meanwhile colloquial language as the main writing language has come into the stage, in order to have the effect on vivid writing, satire is come out. In this situation, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn displays the major achievements of his art: writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience.Ⅲ. The Significance of Mark Twain’s Writing StylesColloquial language and satire are so important in this novel. This image of the quintessential American writing is not really literary goes along with a vision of the great American novel but as a sort of spontaneous telling of unmediated experience. In the same passage Hemingway explains that he has never been able to read Thoreau for being unable to read literary naturalists, only those who are extremely accurate. There aren’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, remarks Huck at the end of his story. The heart of Twain’s achievement is his cre ation of Huck Finn, who embodies that mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the modern super state. That was why Ernest Hemingway once said “all modern American literatures came from one book written by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckl eberry Finn.” And it became Twain’s masterpiece. In short, neither enlightenment nor retrospection elevates the style or the philosophy of Huckleberry Finn’s narrator into the high culture that has placed the work itself at its pinnacle. Ⅴ. ConclusionAs 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. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Twain’s best book because, for whate ver reasons, he brought together in it, with the highest degree of artistic balance, those most fundamental dualities running through his work and life from start to finish. Most of all it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, dire ct, 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。