Effects of an Unreliable Narrator - Authors often use unreliable narrators to reveal truths about human nature and society.
- For instance, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's portrayal of racism through the eyes of the young girl, Scout, serves to show that the moral corruption of racism is evident even to a child.
Objective - In this lesson, you will identify and analyze characteristics of satire and humor in realist literature.
Humor in American Realism Satire - Works of satire are written in a humorous way to point out a flaw in society or a particular person.
- American humor blossomed during the realist period, as evidenced by writers such as Mark Twain and Charles Farrar Browne.
- Many characteristics of their writing, including using ordinary characters and writing in the vernacular, or common language, were also characteristics of realist writing as a whole.
- Twain wrote stories and novels satirizing racial relations, various British customs, and class differences in the 1800s.
Humor in American Realism Hyperbole - One technique many humorists employ is hyperbole, a rhetorical device that exaggerates facts and details. Writers use hyperbole to emphasize a point or to add humor based on the absurdity or irrationality of the idea being exaggerated.
- Consider the previous example from Browne's “Interview with President Lincoln.” Where does it contain hyperbole?
- I should move heving and arth—so to speak—until I got orfice [office] . . .
- "Move heving and arth," or moving heaven and earth, is a hyperbole meaning that the speaker will try anything to accomplish his task.
Humor in American Realism - Which sentences in this excerpt from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn use hyperbole?
- He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly.
- Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close together.
- There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders.
- Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch.
- Well, I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.
- Pretty soon Jim says: "Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin."
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