Death and humor in Huckleberry FinnHuckleberry Finn can be read as an adventure novel for children, as a work of serious literature, as a humorous historical tale, as a biting social satire. . . I'm sure I could go on. This is a book that has delighted generations of readers: it is extremely funny, full of adventure and hopelessly morbid. Right. I read Huckleberry Finn and it made me think about death. The novel has a strange way of dealing with death. There is a fairly high body count, but each individual death becomes an opportunity for high comedy. We laugh and the novel will laugh with us. But he won't cry. Perhaps this was a nod to the time and place. As the poetry of the time suggests, life in late nineteenth-century America was not exactly cheerful. Take this poem, published less than a year before Huckleberry Finn, as just one example: When I'm gone - Say it! The happy wind will wander; Bending with the tenderest touches, yet assailed with cheerful cares, Lifting the long gray rushes, where the stream and I dream so lazily? I feel his soft caress; the play of his wild wooden tenderness on forehead and lips and eyes and hair, as if by love they knew that days must come when no gentle wind will creep down where my heart sleeps! Have you a sympathy, a soul, O wandering wind, that you sigh for? Or is it not the heart within us that still suffers for better or for worse, and believes that Nature whispers, when alone our inner Self groans?"Longing", by Wi...... half of the newspaper. .....ems, among others, Mark Twain, Walter Blair and Huck Finn. (California: University of California Press, 1960).[5] Mark Twain. Following the Equator. England: Dover Publications, 1988.[6] Julia A. Moore. Deadly Choruses: The Complete Collection of Poems, Prose, and Songs by Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer from Michigan. Thomas J. Riedlinger, Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998 (5).[7] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: WW Norton and Company, 1999 (124).[8] Mark Twain. “Post-Mortem Poetry,” The Complete Humorous Sketches and Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday, 1961 (156).[9] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: WW Norton and Company, 1999 (295).[10] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999 (194).