Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Tone

Moralistic, Introspective, Tongue-In-Cheek

Twain’s attitude is clearly a moralistic one: he has a point to make and he’s going to get it across. He does this with the story’s plot line as well as through Huck’s explanation of his inner thoughts. Here’s a good tone example from Chapter 31:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all the happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me up against him, but only the other kind...

Besides Huck’s many moral quandaries and important, life-changing decisions, there’s also a ton of humor in the novel. Twain was a master of irony, wit, sarcasm, and satire, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is riddled with all of them. Twain drops all kinds of irony into the plot, but one of his favorite ironic tricks to play usually occurs at Huck’s expense, simply because Huck is thirteen and not always the most socially perceptive boy.

This sort of dramatic irony seems to pop up on nearly every page. For instance, often when Huck is lying to others, we can tell people don’t believe him, although Huck thinks he’s a real smooth talker. Twain uses this to sprinkle comic effect throughout the story. It’s not only Huck who suffers from the inability to see himself the way others do – the duke and the king say they are a real English Duke and the rightful King of France (the "lost" son of the assassinated Louis XVI). We know through Huck’s description that neither of them is even remotely believable as a European aristocrat. The ridiculousness of their claims is amusing, to say the least. Twain is famous for his particular brand of tongue-in-cheek humor, and he’s at the top of his game with Huckleberry Finn.