Satir

Satir

The first satire is religious hypocrisy. Twain used the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud to portray this issue. Mark Twain wrote, “The men took their gun [to church] and kept them between their knees or stood them handily against the wall.”(Twain 109). These men go to church to pray to God and when they're done, they go out and kill people. They claimed to be a religious person, but they don't follow the teachings. I think Twain was saying that people during this time were hypocrites, they go to church to make themselves look good in front of other people, they don't really take it seriously. Another good example of this is when Twain wrote, “By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayer, and then everybody was off to bed”(Twain 3). Religion is one of the key victims of Twain's satire. He speaks through Huck declaring it, at least as it was taught, to be irrelevant to the average person's life, "Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see..." (pg. 4). Not much later Huck finds that prayer has never done him any good, and he can't see that it has helped many others either. Through Huck's eyes we see that Twain opposes the blind faith put in the church teachings. He also finds that religion's supposed altruistic spirit clashes with the reality of our self-motivated human nature, as Huck clearly illustrates through his constant remarks that he doesn't see what's in it [religion] for him. Twain also uses the families to underscore his subtle satire on religion, as the two families attend the same church, leaning their guns against the walls during the sermon about “brotherly love.” The mixture of theology and gunplay is ironic, as is the family’s subsequent reaction that the sermon was filled with positive messages about “faith and good work and free grace and preforeordestination.” Twain’s Calvinist background resurfaces in his combination of predestination and foreordination. A good illustration of...