Enduring Understandings

      In Mark Twain’s most famous novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain implements a sense of ruggedness for the characters. Twain implements this sense of the characters being young but also being very independent through there being a big focus on the children and not so much of the focus on the adults. Tom starts off being a twelve year boy. At the beginning of the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom is a boy who gets into quite a bit of mischief. As the novel progresses we see Sawyer beginning to mature as he gets more responsibility. Tom however doesn’t instantly jump from this disobedient boy to a mature boy in an instant. Instead Tom’s progression of maturity is a very gradual development with him still messing up along the way. Mark Twain includes elements that we can see in other famous works such as Robin Hood with characters going on adventures and more. We can see Tom Sawyer progressing in his maturity in the cave scene in chapter 31-32 when Tom steps up and helps to protect Betty who Sawyer has a crush on. This shows him growing up because if he were younger it would be more of a petty likeness compared to protecting her from danger. Although Tom Sawyer matures through the novel he still keeps his sense of resourcefulness and adventurous behavior.

    In the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we also can see some characteristics carry over from Tom Sawyer but Twain also introduces a new part of character development. Finn is uneducated and the son of the town drunkard. Even though he is the son of a drunkard Huck still has a great sense of disposition and a strong sense of morality. Huck Finn encounters a bunch of different people throughout the novel helping contribute to his overcoming of racial prejudices. 

    In conclusion, Mark Twain throughout these two books includes examples of ruggedness in the boys and a sense of maturity throughout helping us better understand how Twain grew up as a kid.

 

    

       In both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer the location and setting of the novel are the same. Both stories take place in a small town that is along the Mississippi River. Both books specify Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn growing up along the banks of the Mississippi River. Mark Twain heavily relies on his experiences as a child growing up along the Mississippi River to help develop the setting of both books. Growing up Mark Twain would hear stories from steamboat captains about great adventures and would eventually end up putting these elements together in his most popular novels. 

    In the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer the setting is a medium sized town with most of the people knowing everyone else. There was a docking area for boats carrying cargo and people, a main street, countryside, and caves in the nearby area. Tom Sawyer would spend time in both the town and also in the countryside, forest, cave region, and along the river. The streets were dirt roads perfect for carriages and for horses and walking. 

    In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the setting is also along the Mississippi River. Since both novels intertwine with one another the town is the same. However Huck spends more time in the countryside/forest area of town since his dad was the town drunkard and was considered an outcast. Huck spent quite a bit of time along creeks and brooks in the forests surrounding St. Petersberg, Missouri. 

    St. Petersburg, Missouri is a fictional town that is based off of Mark Twain’s own hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. St. Petersburg had all of the characteristics of a small town at the time. The center of town was the courthouse, there was a riverside dock, a post office, houses surrounding, and a schoolhouse.

    To conclude Mark Twain not only uses his settings of his novels as backdrops but to bring the reader into the story making the reader feel a sense of being in the story.

    Mark Twain uses a variety of writing styles and techniques in his books and novels. Twain is especially good at making the reader be enraptured into his book through the way his plot and structure of his books are set up. 

    Mark Twain’s most useful sense of plot and structure is his use of realism. In his novels Mark Twain incorporates events that happened in his own life into the story. Some events are him growing up along the Mississippi River to shape the setting and how different parts of his books have a sense of growing up along a busy river. He incorporates stories of riverboat captains telling their own stories to Tom Sawyer, making the characters seem like how a normal person would live. 

    Mark Twain used elements comparing his characters to help reinforce the rhetoric of his novels. Mark Twain would compare the places of his characters to places that exist in the real world. He would rely on rhetorical questions and repetition also to help convey a sense of familiarity. Twain also relied on the story within a story novel structure. Twain would make the narrators of his novels the audience for another story.

    Mark Twain would also make use of a complex sentence structure. Twain would have compound-complex sentences right alongside simple sentences. If Twain ever incorporated a simple sentence the sentence would be simple and straightforward. Some sentences would be long and windy with clauses though.

    Finally the most useful part of Mark Twain’s novels was how he made use of dialogue. Quite a bit of his novel’s would be made up with characters talking with one another. Twain did this so as to make it feel like the characters were real and had real human interactions with one another.

 

    In Mark Twain’s novels his narrators were not just there telling the story they can be considered their very own characters in his stories. 

    Mark Twain also makes use of first person narration. Having this type of narration in his books helps us as readers see the world that the narrators are describing to use. In the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the story is told through the eyes of Huck Finn. People often credit Mark Twain of being a master of telling stories in first person.

    Another part about Mark Twain’s speakers are having the narrators being unreliable. Having an unreliable narrator is where the narrator is uncertain about the events of the story. An unreliable narrator adds a complexity of layers to the story. Having this complexity causes the reader to have to discern the truth from things that the narrator could say.

    Mark Twain also is able to incorporate elements of a complex dialect and language into his novels. Twain’s use of being able to use African American dialect shows his capability of using different languages causing him to have an ear for different dialects.

    Twain also makes his narrator like a frame and adds another narrator to tell the main story with the first narrator being support.

 

Works Cited

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. 

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Pearson Education, 2008.