Mark Twain’s functional humor: rereading The Private Life of Adam and Eve
Abstract
Mark Twain was lifelong fascinated by the biblical book of Genesis. The characters of Adam and Eve returned many times in his writings and they became the symbol of a conflict between human creatures and God. In The Private Life of Adam and Eve, the American novelist uses humoristic strategies to conduct his argument and to show up his serious reasoning about some religious themes. In this way, we can place Twain’s irony side by side to Pirandello’s notion of “umorismo” to understand how the diaries of Adam and Eve are important in the main Twainian works.
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