Huck Finn and Frederick douglass related to the civil war era

Huck Finn and Frederick douglass related to the civil war era

Mark Twain's Hucklberry Finn, and Frederick Douglass' Self Narrative both represent the Civil War time period accurately. Both books show outstanding examples of slave owners and the common southerner, against slaves and abolitionists, all key figures of society from that era. The two books express the dire ignorance of Southerners and Slave owners, and their brutality against oppressed slaves, and how society targeted Abolitionists in the South and   somewhat North. Another reason why the era is portrayed precisely is the fact that both authors use personel experiences to describe the times.
"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio-a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane-the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and coult talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out"(27, Twain).The deathly pallor of Pap's skin, which is nauseating to Huck, makes Pap emblematic of whiteness. Unfortunately, Pap represents the worst of white society: he is illiterate, ignorant, violent, and profoundly racist. The first paragraph of Douglass's Narrative demonstrates the double purpose of the work as both a personal account and a public argument. Douglass introduces the reader to his own circumstances—his birthplace and the fact that he does not know his own age. He then generalizes from his own experience, explaining that almost no slaves know their true ages. Next, Douglass takes this detail of his experience and analyzes it. He points out that slave owners deliberately keep their slaves ignorant, and that this is a tactic whites use to gain...