The Adventures of Huck Finn by Mark Twain

Introduction

The pattern of the publication is based on the simplest of all novel-forms, the so-called picaresque innovative, or innovative of the street, which strings its incidents on the line of the hero's travels. But, as Pascal says, "rivers are roads that move," and the action of the street in its own mysterious life transmutes the primitive simplicity of the form: the street itself is the greatest feature in this innovative of the street, and the hero's departures from the stream and his returns to it compose a subtle and significant pattern. The linear simplicity of the picaresque innovative is farther changed by the story's having a clear spectacular organization: it has a starting, middle, and an end, and a climbing on suspense of interest.

Discussion

As for the style of the publication, it is not less than definitive in American literature. The prose of Huckleberry Finn established for in writing prose the virtues of American colloquial speech. This has not anything to manage with pronunciation or grammar. It has something to manage with ease and flexibility in the use of language. Most of all it has to manage with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, sustaining the tempo of the word-groups of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice.

In the issue of language, American publications had a special problem. The juvenile territory was inclined to believe that assess of the really scholarly merchandise was a grandiosity and elegance not to be discovered in the widespread speech. It thus boosted a larger break between its vernacular and its scholarly dialect than, say, English publications of the same time span ever allowed. This accounts for the depression ring one now and then hears even in the work of our best writers in the first half of the last century. English writers of identical stature would not ever have made the lapses into rhetorical excess that are widespread in Cooper and Poe and that are to be discovered even in Melville and Hawthorne.

No publications, really, was ever so taken up with matters of speech as ours was. "Dialect," which captivated even our serious writers, was the acknowledged common ground of our well liked humorous writing. Nothing in social life seemed so amazing as the distinct forms which speech could take--the brogue of the immigrant Irish or the mispronunciation of the German, the "affectation" ...