HUMOR, SATIRE, AND IRONY AS DOMINANT STYLISTIC FEATURES OF MARK TWAIN'S THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

This article examines humor, satire, and irony as the dominant stylistic features of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Following the IMRAD format, sixteen comic episodes were purposively sampled from the novel and coded with Raskin's script-opposition theory of humor, Booth's concept of stable irony, and Simpson's discourse model of satire. Irony occurs in 15 of the 16 episodes and satire in 14. Satire targets chiefly religious formalism, schooling, adult hypocrisy, and public sentimentality. It is predominantly gentle (Horatian) and turns sharp (Juvenalian) in only three episodes. The three modes form a layered system: humor supplies the mechanism, irony the narrative stance, and satire the evaluative target. Their combination produces a "double vision" in which a boy's perspective and an adult narrator's ironic distance coexist.