Setting in Huck Finn and Siddhartha

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“Setting is a powerful vehicle of thematic concerns; in fact, it is one of the most powerful”. Using the two books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Siddhartha, by Mark Twain and Herman Hesse respectively, I can proudly state that to a very huge extent, this statement proves true for both novels and helps to carry across the author’s purpose in a clearer and more significant manner.

Firstly in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the true setting behind the novel affects how the story is brought across to readers, depicting the happenings just as they are during that time. This novel is set and written in the 1800s where it wasn’t considered immoral or erroneous to consider black people nothing more than property. People did not even consider mistreating blacks as racial, it was a social norm and everyone was okay with it. Slavery and racism did happen, and Twain did a great job in showing this ugly side of the world to the half of the world who had no idea at all.

It was a fact and still remains a fact that most people in the 1800s were racist and even the kindest of people, symbolized by the Phelps’, who was a family of God fearing, polite and kind people, still used the term nigger when they referred to their slaves. The words written and the actions and thoughts spoken aloud were very necessary to give the story its structure. Thus it can be said that there is not an inch of racism in Twain’s voice, but a mere depiction of the truth, and the theme of whites mistreating blacks can be clearly observed by readers.

Secondly, I will be discussing on the dualism of Night and Day in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Besides furnishing an appropriate backdrop for the racial conflicts in the novel, it constitutes a structural principle that is pervasive and significant.

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There are several apparent reasons for Mark Twain's choice of a nighttime setting for most of Huckleberry Finn. First, and most obviously, the plot, as well as historical accuracy, demanded it: a runaway boy and a fugitive slave had to travel under the cover of darkness and lie low during the day.

Then, too, night is indispensable to the variably Gothic and mock-Gothic moods of the novel, with its haunted structures and titillating graveyard scene; its sleeve-clutching tales of mayhem, murder, and misrule; its heroes' hairbreadth escapes from disaster and their superstitions about snakes and witches.

Thirdly, darkness—because of its ...

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