Scarlet Letter vs. Huckleberry Finn

Many authors find satire a successful tactic to lure and influence readers. Satire is the use of irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit to attack or expose foolishness and stupidity. The meaning of the satire in a novel is not always found easily, often taking careful attention to the connotation of words in order to catch the author’s intention. Without closely looking at each novel, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, one may miss the fundamentally similar use of satire. Yes, Huckleberry Finn is a story of a youthful freedom seeker traveling down the Mississippi attempting to help his black friend escape slavery while The Scarlet Letter is a strange allegory of an adulterous woman who has been cast from society and forced to where a scarlet A. However, stylistically, both authors use satire as their main rhetorical devise to condemn and criticize society’s ignorance and gullibility.
In the midst of the literal storyline of each ...