The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn question?

Question

I've this question that I really need a real answer.



- Discuss Twain's use of dialects in the novel. What effects do these dialects have on the reader. Do they take away from the novel as a whole?

Answer 1

Well, they add color and flavor to the characters! The entire story is character-driven, so the use of dialects is an intrinsic part to the success of the book as a whole.

Answer 2

Mark Twain is a master of capturing the subtletys of dialects not only of areas, but also of culture. Even if you are reading silently, you can still "hear" what his characters sound like. How they speak is a big part of their personality. If you took away that jargon then Tom and Huck would be on the same level with each other, the stories would lack depth and contrast, and would not have so much of their rich texture or true to life feel. Rather than detracting from the novel, the dialects add very much to it.

Answer 3

Hopefully you picked up on the "non-standard" English used throughout the novel. This is Twain's use of dialect. Now all you have to do is explain what effect this had on you as a reader.

Some people think this detracts from the novel because it is hard to read; some people like the authenticity of having the characters speak in a natural dialect.

Answer 4

The writing (that is, Huck’s storytelling and the characters’ conversations) is a delight–richly descriptive, humorous, and suspenseful. But it is not true, as some have observed, that Huck’s first-person narration and the conversation of the strange mixture of characters represent authentic regional dialects. And thank goodness for that. Were they truly authentic, the novel would be a tedious agglomeration of mispronunciations, backwoods neologisms, and weird grammar. Rather than bogging the novel down with language problems, Twain flavors the writing with just enough local patois to give it bite–but not so much that the novel becomes unpalatable. Twain learned to write this way from writers of "local color," an American literary movement of the last half of the 19th Century. Besides presenting narratives in a regional dialect, local-color writers, or "local colorists," attempted to portray life in the various sections of burgeoning America. More……

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Twain.html#Style


STUDY NOTES for Huckleberry Finn.

These links will give you a summary of the book, character analysis, plot and much more, so that you will be able to answer literary questions.

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Twain.html#HuckFinn

http://litsum.com/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/

http://www.antistudy.com/search.php?title=The+Adventures+of+Huckleberry+Finn+

http://www.freebooknotes.com/page.php?link=http://www.novelguide.com/huckleberryfinn/index.html&book=1673

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmHuckFinn02.asp

http://summarycentral.tripod.com/theadventuresofhuckleberryfinn.htm

http://www.myschoolonline.com/folder/0,1872,23543-195097-26-36990,00.html

Answer 5

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain's exhilarating Mississippi adventures story and the companion to Tom Sawyer In hiding from his drunken and tyrannical father,Huck Finn escapes to Jackson's Island ,where he meets Jim ,a runaway slave.Together the boys set off on a raft down the Mississippi ,in a daring bid for freedom from so-called 'sivilization"

Answer 6

Dialects help create character and communicate to the audience things like the character's level of education, place of birth, etc. Dialects no doubt enhance the novel and give it a sense of realism.

Answer 7

I would say they add to the novel because they further immerse the reader into what life was like in that time period on the Mississippi and in middle America. They bring the reader into the novel, and although they could be at times hard to understand, make the novel better as a whole.

Answer 8

He uses the dialects to establish the primary social levels. Erudite versus unerudite. The usesage puts the reader into the environment of those societies. They enhance the work. Without-- it would be like reading the Uncle Remus Stories written in pure "Kings" English. "Brother Rabbit! Brother Fox!"