Two Views of the Mississippi

Two Views of the Mississippi Before beginning his vocation of being an author Samuel Clemens better known by his pen name Mark Twain, fulfilled his one lasting childhood ambition of becoming a steamboat pilot. Twain writes about his journey on the river in his autobiographical book Life on the Mississippi where in one section he talks about how one thing he would have to do is learn to distinguish the two views of the Mississippi, the beauty of the river and the navigational aspect of the river. I believe that one of the main messages is that even though you may love something, as time goes on you lose the beauty and innocence you had one seen in it. He describes this message through the use of figurative language and well placed rhetoric as he juxtaposes the ideas of the beauty and practicality of the Mississippi River. Mark Twain begins the first section of this excerpt with the statement that he “had mastered the language of this water”, which in all reality is actually a hyperbole, or an exaggeration, because nothing, ranging anywhere from breathing to performing a surgery, is ever truly able to be perfected or mastered. He uses this hyperbole at the beginning of this section to show how advanced he was in the knowledge of the river in that part of time. Twain then move on to use an oxymoron to describe the features of the river that he had “mastered” as “trifling”, or unimportant, saying that he knew every “trifling feature” along the river as he “knew the letters of the alphabet” with this he is saying that he knew all of these features of the river very well and to him they seemed irrelevant and saying he made a “valuable acquisition”. He uses this language to show us that all of the things along the river that he deals with everyday are irrelevant and unneeded. At the end of this section Twain juxtaposes this statement completely by calling all of these features “useful.” This language works because it creates a paradox with what he had