ABSTRACT
In this chapter, one of author's basic assumptions is that humor has distinctive national colorations and that if offers a good deal of information about the assumptions, values, and dispositions of cultures. This is why a novel like Huckleberry Finn is considered, by the overwhelming majority of literary scholars, as a great American novel. Until the "discovery" of Huckleberry Finn a few decades ago by literary critics, it was seen as a children's book about a young boy's adventures on a raft, and not much different— perhaps not as "good"— as Tom Sawyer. A closer look at the book revealed that the various adventures added up to a devastating attack upon the ugliness of slavery and many other nineteenth-century American institutions. The raft and river became symbols of the pastoral ideal which was to give way to the steamboat, railroad and industrialism; and the very language of the book was seen as a major influence upon American literature.
