寡妇家过上等人的体面生活，从那里逃出来后对他的朋友汤姆?索亚发牢骚说：“我试过了，还是不行；不行啊，汤姆。那不是我过的日子??那寡妇家吃饭要听钟声，睡觉要听钟声，起床也要听钟声，什么事情都得规规矩矩，简直叫人受不了。”
Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life of his own, in a book often considered the best ever written about Americans. His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave presents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.
《汤姆?索亚》风靡美国九年之后，哈克被赋予独立的生命，成为一本被许多人认为是最成功的描写美国人的作品的书中的主人公。他同一个逃跑出来的奴隶一起乘坐木筏沿着密西西比河顺流而下的漂流航程展现了一幅幅揭示美国社会生活全貌的生动画面。 On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamor for success.
通过对密西西比河，尤其是对哈克?费恩这一人物的描写，马克?吐温将自己想从那束缚着自己并常常令自己苦恼的生活步调中摆脱出来，从生活中的各种清规戒律以及为了事业成功而进行的艰苦挣扎中解放出来的愿望表达得淋漓尽致。
Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: \the shelf occasionally and renew our edges.\
马克?吐温认为，美国人的理想中缺少了一种成分。他说：“我们只消偶尔地躺下来好好放松休息一下，保持锋棱利角，我们将有可能成为一个多么朝气蓬勃的民族，一个多么富有思想的民族啊!”
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis, Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter. Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub.
马克?吐温的一生都笼罩在悲剧的阴影之中，自己的亲人一个接一个地去世：他的父亲在他十二岁那年死于肺炎，他的兄弟亨利在一次汽船爆炸事故中遇难；他的儿子朗顿才满十九个月即离开人世。他的大女儿苏茜死于脊膜炎；克莱门斯夫人在佛罗伦萨死于心脏病；而他的小女儿也因癫痫病的发作淹死在楼上的浴盆里。
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater. In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make a better world.
这位曾令全世界欢笑的人自己却饱尝了人世的辛酸。他早期作品中的道德说教厚厚地包着一层幽默的外衣，现在幽默换成了辛辣的讽刺。对于美国军队在一个火山口上屠杀六百名菲律宾摩洛人的行为，他没有直接进行抨击，而是假装为之高唱赞歌。在《神秘的陌生人》中，他指出人类应该抛弃宗教幻想，依靠自己而不是上帝的力量去创造一个更加美好的世界。 The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men's final release from earthly
struggles: \nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed – a world which will lament them a day and for-get them forever.” 他自己的最后一个幻想到后来似乎也破灭了。在晚年口述自传的时候，他以极端绝望的心情谈到人从尘世的苦难中的最终解脱：“??他们从世界上消失了，在这个世界上他们无足轻重，无所成就；甚至他们的存在本身就是个错误，是个失败，是种愚蠢。这个世界上也没有留下丝毫能表明他们存在过的痕迹。这个世界赠给他们的只是一日的哀伤和永久的遗忘。”
Devices of figuration
Metaphor
Mark Twain --- Mirror of America
saw clearly ahead a black wall of night...
main artery of transportation in the young nation's heart the vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled United States All would resurface in his books...that he soaked up... Steamboat decks teemed...main current of...but its flotsam When railroads began drying up the demand... ...the epidemic of gold and silver fever... Twain began digging his way to regional fame...
Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles... ...took unholy verbal shots...
Simile:
Most American remember M. T. as the father of... ...a memory that seemed phonographic
Hyperbole:
...cruise through eternal boyhood and ...endless summer of freedom... The cast of characters... - a cosmos.
Parallelism: Most Americans remember ... the father of Huck Finn's idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of freedom and adventure.
Personification:
life dealt him profound personal tragedies... the river had acquainted him with ...
...to literature's enduring gratitude...
...an entry that will determine his course forever... the grave world smiles as usual... Bitterness fed on the man...
America laughed with him.
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life.
Antithesis:
...between what people claim to be and what they really are... ...took unholy verbal shots at the Holy Land...
...a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever
Euphemism:...men's final release from earthly struggle
Alliteration:
...the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home ...with a dash and daring...
...a recklessness of cost or consequences...
Metonymy:...his pen would prove mightier than his pickaxe
Synecdoche Keelboats,...carried the first major commerce
