Mark Twain's The Life And Culture Of The Mississippi River

How does Mark Twain view the Mississippi river versus civilization, and how does Hawthorne view the forest versus civilization? Mark Twain is a pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens; he chose this name after his love for the Mississippi River. Mark Twain lived from 1835 until 1910. He lived in Missouri as a child, when he was eighteen years old he moved to New York City. He was 21 when he returned to Missouri. The Mississippi river played a huge part in his life. He worked on the river as a river pilot until the Civil War broke out, because traffic on the Mississippi was curtailed. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the United States in February 1885. The Mississippi river is described in detail in the narrative as well as the people and places alongside the Mississippi. Nature played a big role in his narrative, and especially the Mississippi river.

In Twain’s work, “Life on the Mississippi,” the main character spends such a lengthy amount of time on the Mississippi River as a steamboat pilot that his perspective of the river changes from a passenger in awe to a pilot expecting the worst.

About three hundred miles up the Mississippi River form its mouth. Many parish above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge. A new navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river. When they drop they tend to descend as much as thirty-three feet. Then go off to the west or south whichever way they decide to go. The adjacent is known as Cajun country.

The first half of Life on the Mississippi was ideally written and reading the extremely detailed and captivating account of Twain's apprenticeship was quite enjoyable. However, the second part of the book was not as fascinating. The short stories were frequently only two pages long and were not very well connected to be a clear read. Though a few of the characters Twain met on his journey were quite interesting, the majority of them merely served as an example of a certain characteristic which he wished to further discuss. This may be due to the fact that Twain was much older by the time he made the trip in the second half of the book, and he had grown aware of the various faults of humanity and thus wrote more analytically and critically than he did in the first half to reflect his change in character and the change of the times he lived in.

Those with the power to speak remained silent--as complacent in the oppression of African Americans as the slave-drivers of years past. The vices of such a society were candidly ignored; indeed, struggling for the rights of others seemed futile. Direct action was social (and, where lynchings were quietly ignored by the law, literal) suicide, yet writers like Mark Twain took to the pen to spread their messages for equality and criticisms on society. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a fictional tale of a young boy’s adventure. However, this innocuous veneer, much like the Gilded Age itself, hides a deeper, darker theme of the pitfalls of modern society, presented in a mockingly lighthearted, sarcastic tone. As Huckleberry Finn matures throughout his journey, his idealization of what it means to be ‘sivilized’ is battered and broken down into a far more cynical view, revealing Twain’s own criticisms of

Human perception is a subject so diverse and impossible to delineate that we cannot even hope to understand it fully. It is perhaps due to this incompleteness in our grasp of the subject that literary and scholarly works aiming to interpret it abound. Among the list of venturing authors who sought to address this elusive subject is Mark Twain, whose excerpt from Life on the Mississippi presents a unique idea about experiential learning. More specifically, Twain contends that intimate familiarity can diminish appreciation through use of an extended metaphor, elaborate description, and analogy.

For Gilman, the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the female and the “active” work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. The story reveals that this gender division had the effect of keeping women in a childish state of ignorance and preventing their full development. John’s assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his

Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, two of America’s greatest 19th-century narrative writes could hardly have been more different in tone and viewpoint. Mark Twain lived in a somnolent river town, growing up enjoying adventures with his childhood friends. This was vastly different from Frederick Douglass bleak exitinstance growing up as slave on a plantation who was very deprived of food, warmth, and family. Both authors write about their childhoods, but this is where the similarities stop. Twain's lighthearted tone and subjective point of view are meant to entertain. Unlike Douglass's serious tone and objective description support his purpose of informing the public about the evils of slavery.

Mark Twain was a very interesting fellow, having many interests and partaking in stimulating hobbies as a child in Hannibal. He had a strong interest in traveling through and observing the outdoors, having access to caves and forests that gave him the “opportunity for exploration and adventure” ("Mark Twain." Contemporary Authors Online). This is similar to Tom Sawyer, as Sawyer also loved to sneak out and go wandering around town. Sawyer, at one point in the novel, ran away from home with his friends and camped out on an island for a couple of days. Twain had also been fascinated with the Mississippi River, spending a fair amount of his time “observing its busy life, fascinated by its romance, but chilled by the violence and bloodshed it bred” ("Mark Twain."

The diction Gilman employs relates directly to the lasting role of women in the home to expose the historical adversities endured within the domestic sphere. The intricacy with which Gilman composes the text highlights the inherent

The book expresses the time period of America in which Twain was writing, realistically through the way the people speak, the way people acted and are treated and through how society had impacted the youth into having racist thoughts. This caused much controversy in the time period. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that there was a problem with color, nor did anyone want to address the fact that blacks and poorer people were treated harshly. This book put these issues in the spotlight for the first time

In the excerpt Life on the Mississippi, it discusses how Mark Twain has a different viewpoint of the river from the beginning of the excerpt to the end were he does not have the same feeling that he had. Twain had found out the truth about the:grace, beauty, and poetry of the Mississippi river. As Mark Twain experiences the Mississippi River, his perspective of the river changes from the beginning of the excerpt to the end. Twain descriptive details about the river showed the wonderful beauty of the river.

After reading the excerpt from Mark Twain's story two ways of seeing a river i've been introduced to a new idea that the beauty of an object or concept changes as you start to observe and understand the thing. For me this phenomenon has occurred for the world around me. When i was young the world was a magical place full of mysteries and surprises but then i grew up and i was no longer the innocent youth that i once was. I gained knowledge and experience and soon the world became bleak and the beauty had left i saw the horrors of this world and the only thing that brings me comfort is the thought of the future which holds more beauty in the form of mysteries and surprises yet to come.

Mark Twain is expressing how the view of the river has changed ever since he started driving the steam boat. Twain once viewed the river as being graceful and beautiful. He remembers how amazing the sunset was when he started working as a steam boat pilot. At the beginning he thought that it was all fun and didn't ever think it was dangerous but, now that he has been piloting the steam boat on the river over and over again he realizes that the river is not as beautiful as he described it to be, and that it's in fact very dangerous. The place the twain once thought was so graceful and beautiful was full of signs, signs that meant danger. Twain expresses the dangers of the river by saying, that the floating log means that the river is rising,

To fully understand the themes within Mark Twain’s novels we all must first understand his upbringing, where he was born, where he was raised, and what was going on within the era of his life. Samuel