Irony In Pudd Nhead Wilson

Tell the truth or trump- but get the trick
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar

This first aphorism of the book Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain already gives an indication of what is going to happen in the following chapter. This quotation from Wilson’s calendar is about the remark made by David Wilson when he just arrived in the town Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. The remark he made was:

‘I wish I owned half that dog.
‘Why?’ Somebody asked.
‘Because I would kill my half.’

Wilson was trying to make a joke full of irony, however, the people in Dawson’s Landing did not get it and therefore labelled Wilson a pudd’nhead because they thought the remark was fairly stupid (because when you own half a dog, you will own a dead half anyway). This remark

Roxy, one of the slaves owned by Percy Driscoll, is being threatened by her master, he threatens to “sell (her and the others) down the river” which is “the equivalent to condemning them to hell” after he accuses them of thievery. After this incident Driscoll sets the incident down in his personal diary because he “was privately well pleased with his magnanimity” and he hoped his son would read it in the future and would be “moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself”. This fragment of the novel is dripping of irony because both the options given to the slaves, confess and therefore being punished, or just being sold down the river anyway, are just as bad. Confessing is only the lesser of two evils because you would be sold in town which meant you could still get a nice master. Twain is able to introduce the division between black and whites by using irony and showing that “whites” feel superior to the

Roxy herself is described as: "Only one-sixteenth of her was black and that sixteenth did not show... Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro”. This phrase shows the ridiculous law that anybody who has only one fraction of ‘black blood’ in his or her body is immediately ‘black’ as a person, even though the skin nor anything else, physically shows that the person is ‘black’. This is emphasized with the description of her son Chambers: “Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom, a Negro.” With these descriptions of the characters in the novel, Twain identifies that the American law is arbitrary, not the colour of the people. American people should be protected by the legal system of America, however these laws fail all citizens, whether they are black, white or any other