【正文】 sented in a straightforward or matteroffact manner. Fundamentally, in literature, realism is the portrayal of life with fidelity. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It is antiromantic, antisentimental, and without interest in nature, death, etc.In the later part of 19th Century, a crowd of realists appeared in European Continent, such as Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, Destoyvsky and Tolstoy. They sought to portray life as it really was, insisting that the ordinary and the local were as suitable for artistic portrayal as the magnificent and the remote. Such a strong wind flew over the Atlantic Ocean, and landed on the North American Continent. American readers or audiences got “hungry” about such mental food. They hoped for getting a vast reading of articles, essays, fictions and poems. It was realism writers such as William Dean Howells, Mark Twain who met such a strong demand (Zhang Xihua, 1996).Mark Twain, known as the Lincoln of American Literature, wrote many books which reflected the American society. As his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn won him the fame all over the world. In this everlasting popular book, Mark Twain dealt with many serious subjects in his time such as politics, religion and slavery.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about an outcast boy Huck and a runaway nigger Jim on the journey down the river. Huck is the narrator and main character of the novel. Slavery and other social evils are exposed by the disreputable, illiterate little boy. He isn’t influenced by civilization, so he has no cunning and sophisticated life philosophy. His sense is spontaneous. He views the society in his childish way and never exaggerates anything he has seen, heard and experienced.2. Realistic themes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn CharacterizationOne of the features of realism is that realism focuses on the monness of the lives of the people who are customarily ignored by the arts. Therefore, Mark twain often showed the basic goodness and wisdom of ordinary people as his major theme and revealed the mon personality and spirit by portraying “specific persons or facts” (Liao Fucai, 2000), such as Huck and Jim. HuckHuck is looked upon as an outcast. He has no mother, no home, “sleeping in barrels, eating scraps and leavings and dressed in rags” (Yang Jie, 1998). He has a father, however, his father has never taken care of Huck but given him cruel beating. There is no doubt that Huck is just like an orphan. As an orphan, Huck suits in a hard environment. Although he receives hardly any education, he learns to be active, intelligent, honest and brave from the hard society.Huck is a rebel of American society. He is used to his free life – no need to pray before dinner, no need to go to school and to church. It seems that the “civilized society” does not fit Huck at all. Therefore, when the pecking of Miss Watson bees unbearable and the deadly dull life tires him, he flees. He rebels mainly because those “kindhearted and civilized” people make him unfortable and ill.Twain wrote stories about how ordinary people tricked experts, or how the weak succeeded in hoaxing the strong (Liang Qing, 1994). There is no doubt that Huck is a master at this point. In Chapter 16, Huck es upon some men in a boat who want to search his raft for escaped slaves. In order to protect Jim from being catching, Huck pretends to be happy and makes the following dialogue to trick them into believing that his father on board the raft has smallpox. The following dialogue can express this point clearly.“Pap’ll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to help me tow the raft ashore, and I can’t do it by myself.”“Well, that’s infernal mean. Odd, too, say, boy, what’s the matter with your father?”“It’s thea–thewell, it ain’s anything much.”They stopped pulling.…… “Well,” says I, ablubbering, “I’ve told everybody before, and they just went away and left us”(2003, p108109).By tricking the two men, Huck not only rescues Jim, but also wins forty dollars in gold.Also, Huck is filled with selfrecrimination and selfcondemnation (Quirk Tom, 2000). When Jim is bitten by the dead snake’s mate, Huck is sorry for the oute and his stupidity, because the dead snake is put into Jim’s blanket by him.Though Huck is young, his wisdom and goodness and honest consciousness is not restricted to the innocence or the childish vision of a young boy (Liang Qing, 1994). From the novel, we can find clearly that Huck is a good boy who has humanistic care. In Chapter 33, after being proven to be deceivers, the duke and the king run out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered. Huck feels sad, although both of them have done many unregretful things to lots of people and they even sell Jim to a farmer by forty dollars. “I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them anymore in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another” (2003, p276). This expresses Huck’s sympathy to human beings. Furthermore, it is also a foil to the inhuman people in the society. They can even treat their own kind in such a bad and crude way.In Huck’s eyes, he should tell Miss Watson where Jim is because Miss Watson is kind to Huck, although sometimes she is stubborn and curious. She always believes that there are good places like heaven and bad places like hell. She also insists that Huck should pray every day. This is the reason that Huck feels guilty. However, during the trip in the various towns and villages along the way, Huck sees many ugly things and cruel people, from which, he has learned about the evil of the world. He begins to suspect and refuse what the white people believe in. Although he is at the risk of going to the hell, according to the white Christians, he decides to try every effort to rescue Jim. It is a turning point for Huck’s growing,