instaling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I am of the latter opinion myself, but even so, Hamlet’s conclusion also suggests that Shakespeare had written himself into a corner and resorted to the Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck. The first believes that it represents a falling off of Twain’s talent and the book’s appeal, a cowardly repudiation of what had gone before the second argues that the book is far more subtly crafted and deliberately structured than that, and the conclusion confirms all the satire that has gone before. There are two schools of thought in Twain scholarship about the last fifth of the novel. There’s more to come in Hamlet, too, which leads to another interesting similarity, and that’s the controversial and, to some, unsatisfying conclusions of both Huck Finn and Hamlet. And there’s more to come, not least a gunshot that leaves Tom Sawyer near death. Before one reaches page 150, Pap Finn, three men on the Walter Scott, and Buck Grangerford (as well as others of the Grangerford clan) have already met violent ends, via a knife in the back, drowning, and shooting that’s more than three deaths against the two deaths of Ophelia (drowning) and Polonius (stabbing). Indeed, violent death weaves through the novel like a black thread. The similarities are more telling.įor a comic novel, Huck Finn has a large body count, nearly as large as Hamlet’s. But to lay out only their differences is to obscure the continuing appeal of both works to a 21st century international readership. Hamlet is tragedy, Huck Finn comedy Hamlet is set in 14th or 15th century Denmark, Huck Finn in the 19th century American South Hamlet’s a play confined to the locality of Elsinore, Huck Finn a picaresque novel.

Comparisons are odious, of course, but that never stopped people like myself from stinking the place up a little.Īt first glance, there couldn’t be two works of literature more different in genre, style, and voice.

If, as Ron Powers suggests in his exemplary biography of the writer, Mark Twain is America’s Shakespeare (and this coming Saturday marks the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is his Hamlet. Originally published here in April 2016, and by far the most popular post I’ve ever written, with over 1,500 hits upon its first appearance.

Instaling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn