Life on the Mississippi short summary & analysis

Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

Life on the Mississippi Analysis

The purpose of Twain's re-enactment is to observe the changes that industrialization has created in and around river traffic, and the desire to monitor the post-war impact. The book, Life on the Mississippi, in which the change and progress in nature and culture is explained in the nature of Mississippi, is considered to be one of the important works of American literature.

Life on the Mississippi Short Summary

His real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, tells us in this book that he contributed to the life and literature of his growth in the town of Hannibal in Missouri, on the western border of the Mississippi River. He conveys the physical, geographical, anthropic and historical characteristics of the river and speaks of it as a living being. In fact, the river is so alive that it baptizes it in the early twenties on the ship Paul Jones, called 'Mark Twain', which means 'two swath depth'. After this 'rebirth', Twain honored his godmother with Tom Sawyer's Adventures, Huckleberry Finn's Adventures, and Life in Mississippi. His love for Mississippi did not overshadow his younger brother Henry's death from a fire on a ship called Pennsylvania.

The master author describes the Mississippi, one of the longest rivers in the world with a length of over 6000 kilometers, and this work consists of two parts. The first part, which consists of 20 chapters, is based on Twain's experiences with Captain Horace Ezra Bixby before the American Civil War, and the second part consists of the post-war changes that he sees as he travels along the river in disguise with a poet and a stenographer, twenty-one years after his resignation as a ship pilot. The first part was published in 1875 in the Atlantic Monthly series.

In the years Twain had experienced, the river had not yet been 'tamed' by humanity. Being a pilot of the ship required great mastership due to the uncontrolled increase and decrease of the water level, the fact that the objects drifting into the river posed a major problem in the slow flowing sea traffic, and the constantly changing factors such as sudden fog. In this vast river of infinite variables, Twain grasped what he had to know with Captain Horace Bixby's elaborate teaching strategies. Through this journey he gained unique learning opportunities and skills shared with the reader of Life in the Mississippi River. These chapters, in which he narrates his experiences in a humorous manner, constitute one of the best chapters in the book. The second part, in which he takes action with the idea of printing and publishing his thoughts on the river, is more fictional than the first twenty sections.

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