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Life On The Mississippi Figurative Language

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In “Life On the Mississippi” by Mark Twain, the author clarifies his experience as a river steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River and how his visualization of the river changed from positive to negative throughout the story. In the excerpt, Mark Twain carries descriptive language to describe his viewpoint of the river throughout the first paragraph. In the first sentence of paragraph 1, Mark says, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger”. By this, he means that the river was something that he could study. He then continues this description later in paragraph 1 saying that the book is therefore “not to be read once and thrown aside”. Mark says this to tell us that …show more content…

In the beginning of paragraph 2, Mark proclaims, “Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.” Earlier in the story he proclaimed that the river was “ a page you could not skip”; however this feeling then changes as he now knows the river like the alphabet. Each paragraph in the passage explicitly shows a change in the perspective of the author towards the river. For instance, in paragraph 2 Mark says,”...all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun…” Throughout the passage, the central idea Mark found is that emotion is based more on mindset than results. For example, in paragraph 2 Mark says,”I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.” Later on in the passage this emotion changes from interest into the river into knowledge of the river. In paragraph 4 he specifically identifies that the “beauty” and “romance” have left the river as a metaphor for how uninterested the river is to him now and how he know knows the river like the back of his

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