Mark Twain – A River Pilot Looks at the Mississippi

The Report:

The authors stance is, the view of how knowledge and experience corrupt one’s view of beauty. His audience for this particular piece are fans who enjoy other pieces of his work. This piece is actually taken from the biography of Mark Twain’s Mississippi. After reading about his personal life one might connect his resentment of the river to the death of his younger brother. This leads to the genre of the article which is a literacy narrative or also known as realism. He tells stories of his past to make the reader think of worldly concepts. The authors purpose for this story is to explain how one may loose beauty through understanding, to show the reader that ignorance may be bliss.

 

The Summary:

Twain compares the water in the Mississippi while on a river boat to reading a book. The book has attention to detail and one without the proper vocabulary would not be able to read it. He describes how someone “uneducated” (Twain, 1) will find the poetry of the book while an educated reader finds the poetry has left. After seeing this river for so many years he realizes what had enchanted him is now gone. Reflecting on this he states another profession, the doctor and how they only recognize the disease and not the people in front of them. 

 

The Response:

Now that I’ve evaluated the rhetorical situation, I’m able to draw the following conclusions about the work in question. I believe Mark Twain is proposing that by being the educated and understanding how everything may work you are not the most privileged. He shows that the uneducated are the ones still able to see the beauty in what is before them.

 

The Analysis:

“All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.” (Twain, 4) This proves how he has become blind to the beautiful nature, simply using it as a manual to safely navigate the river. “And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?” (Twain, 4) When Twain states this he is questioning whether being the educated is the true advantage. By using the doctors profession he shows how they may only see the disease, blind of the person in front of them. He relates this to reading and his own life, how a “uneducated passenger” (Twain, 1) will see beauty in the boat ride where he sees only definition of what they mean. “I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.” (Twain, 2) This line not only brings together the analogy of the river and reading but shows how once you are blessed with knowledge and understanding it is kept with you forever. This shows Twain’s point of view to be that ignorance is bliss.

 

References

 

University of California, Merced. (2005) Mark Twain’s Mississippi Retrieved on October28, 2013, from, http://dig.lib.niu.edu/twain/biography.html.

 

Mark Twain. n.d. A River Pilot Looks at the Mississippi. The Broadview Reader (3^rd Edition. 1999) Broadview Press