blog




  • Essay / The importance of dialect in the adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    "Oh, it's Daddy's witches' fault, and I wish I was dead, that's true. They're all about it, and they don't kill me anymore, they scratch me like that Please don't tell anyone, sah, uh, old March Silas, he'll scold me Now, what would he say I bet! that there's no way out of it at that time. Fix it yourself, and when you solve it and talk about it, they believe you” (245). Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned” Get Original Essay When Huck and Tom attempt to save Jim through herculean rather than mundane efforts, they use the goodwill of another of the slaves from the Phelps plantation Although the reader never knows the slave's name, Twain describes him as a woolly-haired laughing Huck and Tom, in their infinite wisdom, use this slave to send various things to the cabin. Jim, notably a pie with a rope ladder baked inside. At one point, after the boys dig a useless hole from inside a shed under the foundation to Jim's cell, they forget to block it off and Mr. Phelps' entire pack of dogs runs out. also slides under the wall in the room. When the "laughing" slave arrives on the scene with some of Jim's food, notices the dogs and becomes completely stunned, Tom takes advantage of his friendship and creates a whole fiction about the presence of the dogs in the room. Before this scene, the boys had noticed that the slave had her hair tied in small bows, supposedly to ward off witches. The slave responds to Tom's explanation about dogs by invoking his own form of superstition about witches in his Southern dialect. In this passage, Mark Twain attempts to recreate the common language of southern slaves and also illustrates a stereotype regarding people of color. For some whites of the time, it was believed that slaves would have wandering and fanciful minds; thus, Tom believes that describing the dogs as fantasies of the slave is a justifiable way of explaining their presence in Jim's cell. If roughly translated from the dialect, the passage might read like this: Those damn witches, sir, I really wish I were dead. . They are always there (appearing to me) and they almost kill me every time they appear because they scare me so much. Please don't tell anyone, sir, because Mr. Silas will scold me. He says there are no witches. I just wish he were here now – so what would he say? I bet he didn't find a way around it this time! But it's always the same: people who believe in one thing stay that way. They will never look into something they haven't discovered for themselves. And when you find out and tell them about it, they don't believe you!Keep in mind: this is just a sample.Get a custom paper from our expert writers now.Get a custom essayThe Act of To "translate" the slave dialect into a modern, or "acceptable," version of everyday English is to completely destroy Twain's depiction of the story. With the dialect in place, the reader gets a much better sense of the slave as a person who hopes and feels. In this simple English format, the slave doesn't seem to say much – all emotion is drained from the sentence. It is interesting that Twain uses Southern dialect to give personality to the slaves Tom and Huck; if every character spoke the king's English in the manner of Nathaniel Hawthorne or the like, Huckleberry Finn would have no characters and would lose all of its minute, integral details. Moreover,.