Mark Twain's Humor In The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain is a world-renowned literary giant and a gifted humorist. As a prolific writer, he makes great achievements in novels and short stories. However, what makes him popular are mainly his novels, in particular, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For more than one century, this novel has been listed in the canon of great novels. Works and articles of criticism on this novel have been numerous; yet most of the critics'preoccupation is on the humor phenomenon, thus leaving other areas of research not fully studied, such as the theory of humor involved in the novel. This paper, based on western theory of humor, is intended to re-discover Mark Twain's humor in his best-known novel, exploring its source, purpose, and effect, and trying to find out its nature or underlying principle hidden in a world of diverse humors.This thesis is composed of five parts. The introductory part gives a brief introduction to Mark Twain's literary career, and the current study on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and then introduces the aim and thesis statement. Chapter One prepares theoretical background for the following chapters through explaining the incongruity theory of humor in terms of its origin, development and core mechanism: the incongruity mechanism. In Chapter Two, the thesis groups the humor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into five categories according to their sources, and based on the western theory of humor, this thesis analyses each category of humor respectively. Chapter Three continues to analyze the humor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and explore how the humor conforms to the incongruity theory to help Mark Twain achieve his purpose: producing fun to entertain readers and creating satire to satirize the dark society. In the concluding part, based on the theoretical study and textual analysis in previous chapters, this thesis concludes that there are a rich variety of humors in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They seem disorderly, and have no rules to follow; however, actually they are all governed by an underlying principle: the incongruity theory.