¶ … Mark Twain talks mostly about the river and his experiences as a steamboat captain, but much of what he says also applies to the rest of life. The lesson about life that he makes has to do with how people see things for the first time and how they see them after they are used to them. When he first saw the river he was amazed by its beauty and everything was new and fascinating to him. After he had to spend a great deal of time on the river as a steamboat captain he ceased to see the wonder and awe in much of the beauty that the river held and eventually he would cease to notice it altogether. Instead, he would only be looking for the problems that might underlie some of the things he noticed about the river and would not see the beauty anymore.
By becoming to used to something and learning it too well he had become cold and clinical about it instead of taking time to enjoy many of the things that nature had provided. Just like it was for Mark Twain and his river so it is with many things in life for other people. When someone learns a trade and understands it so well that he or she knows everything about it the beauty and wonder that first interested that person is often gone. It makes Mark Twain, and likely many other people as well, wonder if learning the trade was worth the loss of the beauty and wonder. Did someone who loses these things gain enough to make the trade worthwhile? That is a question that only the person who has made that trade can answer, but it seems like Mark Twain did not really think that the trade he had made was worth the loss of the wonder and beauty that he had first seen when he had looked upon the river. Once something like that is gone it can never be recovered because so much is known about the thing in question that it can never again be seen in the same way that it was when the person first looked at it and saw how much beauty it held.
Mark Twain's realism in fully discovered in the novel The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, book which is known to most of readers since high school, but which has a deeper moral and educational meaning than a simple teenage adventure story. The simplicity of plot and the events that are described in the book look to be routine for provincial life of Southerners in the middle of the 19th century. But
Morality of the Minor Characters of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain makes two social outcasts, in the form of Huck and Jim, the most moral characters of his novel. Huck and Jim are the real templates of correct behavior. Yet, the rest of a hypocritical and essentially immoral society devotes itself to either catching or civilizing these characters. By
Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now