How does language contribute to the total effect of Huckleberry Finn?

value Jim as a human being but afterwards also. As late as in chapter 42, after the injured Tom and recaptured Jim have been brought in, Huck reports an excited Aunt Sally “scattering order right and left at the niggers.” Later Tom’s disclosure that Jim is already a free man makes him realize how “he could help a body set a nigger free.” Both these instances are particularly neutral occasions when Huck did not need to have use the terms if he did not want to. Earlier in the Phelps farm where he is mistaken for Tom, he fibs about an explosion on the boat.

Mark Twain’s innovative use of Huck’s colloquial language constitutes a most important landmark in American literature. The language of Emerson, Thsreau, Hawthorne and Melville was formal and ‘literary’ and at its worst also showy. Twain changed it all by successfully demonstrating that colloquial speech could be used effectively to achieve a variety of literary effects. But though as Richard Chase says it is close to the spoken idiom of rural, South West America, the language of Huckleberry Finn is itself a new literary style. This new style has been consciously cultivated and adapted to meet the requirements of a long story. A self-taught