马克吐温的写作风格 以《哈克贝利弗恩历险记》为例(3)

support of personal familiarity, with these several forms of speech.” “Painstaking ” and “not haphazard,” though they possess a humorous ring, denote the conscientious effort on the part of the author, and trustworthiness and familiarity and the author?s awareness of dialects in using which reveal his attempt to reproduce actual daily speech with a degree of accuracy. A recent and very influential recasting of Huck?s vernacular voice has identified. We may quote a passage from this masterpiece as an illustration:

“I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old son and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot/ I took fish lines and matches and other things- everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place I wanted an ax, but there wasn?t any, only the one out at woodpile, and I know why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.”

The words used here are, perhaps “ammunition” which is etymologically French, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, and are short, concrete and direct in effect. Sentence structures are most of them simple or compound, with a series of “then” and “ands” and semi-colons serving as connectives. The repetition of the word “took” and the stringing together of things leave the impression that Mark Twain depend solely on the concrete object and action for the body and movement of his prose. What is more, there is an ungrammatical element, which gives the final finish to his style. The whole book approximates the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from south American of the mid-nineteenth century.

The vernacular language in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn initiated the new style of language in American novels, and has had significant influence upon American writers of later generations.

A Combination of Colloquial Language and Satire

To sum up, fundamentally, Twain is a great American writer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an outstanding novel; one of the most successful writing styles is a combination of colloquial language and satire. In fact, most of Twain?s works are the combination of both

colloquial language and satire, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a case in point. On the other hand, it is his masterpiece as a humorist while the novel also can be eyed as a satire on sentimentality and Romanticism on the other. We have ever seen colloquial language and satire in some works, but no one?s writing is so appropriate like Twain?s. It displays American culture out of the ordinary and the attitude toward the entire society. In this book, the author use the first character to narrate, meanwhile colloquial language as the main writing language has come into the stage, in order to have the effect on vivid writing, satire is come out. In this situation, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn displays the major achievements of his art: writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience. The Significance of Mark Twain’s Writing Styles

Colloquial language and satire are so important in this novel. This image of the

quintessential American writing is not really literary goes along with a vision of the great American novel but as a sort of spontaneous telling of unmediated experience. In the same passage Hemingway explains that he has never been able to read Thoreau for being unable to read literary naturalists, only those who are extremely accurate. There aren?t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, remarks Huck at the end of his story. The heart of Twain?s achievement is his creation of Huck Finn, who embodies that mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the modern super state. That was why Ernest Hemingway once said “all modern American literatures came from one book written by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And it became Twain?s masterpiece. In short, neither enlightenment nor retrospection elevates the style or the philosophy of Huckleberry Finn?s narrator into the high culture that has placed the work itself at its pinnacle.

Conclusion

As one of America?s first and foremost realists and humorists, Mark Twain usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Twain?s best book because, for whatever reasons, he brought together in it, with the highest degree of artistic balance, those most fundamental dualities running through his work and life from start to finish. Most of all it has to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word?s group of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice. Mark Twain?s colloquial style has influenced a large number of American writers. Twain depicted mostly the lower class of society. Meanwhile, local color mixed romantic plots with realistic descriptions of things which were readily observed, i.e. with the customs, dialects, sights, smell and sounds of regional America. Twain shows satire on southern culture before the civil war, when the Mississippi valley was still being settled. Twain blended two different subjects, the experience of westward expansion and the experience of southern slavery. His contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his colloquialism and satire. Commenting on Mark Twain as a social critic, Philip Foner observes that Twain?s social criticism ranks with that of Milton, Swift, Defoe, and Bernard …… 此处隐藏：4362字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……