During the realistic movement authors wrote novels depicting the world as it really was in which true to life characters would have real problems concerning issues of the time period. In the novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain relates the story of a young Southern boy's adventures and his discoveries of how society works. The reader watches Huck and his companion, a runaway slave named Jim go through great lengths in order to free Jim and rescue Huck from his father Pap. Twain uses Huck's beliefs to give the reader insight into the moral climax of the time, racism. Besides being a realistic novel, many elements satirize the time in which it takes place and the events that occurred then. In this novel, Twain gives the reader a sense of satire regarding religion, racism, and romanticism. .
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain uses satire to convey the hypocritical views of religious slave owners. In the beginning of the novel at the Widow's house Huck remarks, "By-and-by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed"(Twain 20). This suggests that they believe the "niggers" to have souls even though they treat them like lesser people. This is significant because Catholics believe everybody to be equal in God's eyes, while everyone is treating the blacks like they are not as important as the whites. While Buck Grangerford explains the Grangerford - Sheperdson feud to Huck, Buck states that "The men took their guns [to church] and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. (Twain 148)" The feud is very strong, but come Sunday both families go to church and set their weapons down; they all praise the sermon about brotherly love, yet they all go back out to kill each other. This is significant because Twain is satirizing the South's revengefulness and how they don't actually apply religion to their own lives. Satirizing religion enables to show the reader that Twain regarded religion to be something that people did at church not outside of it where they owned slaves and treated blacks as if they were nothing.