evamckerr
Eva McKerr
Mark Twain
The article was written by the cheap case study writing service Mark Twain’s Two Ways of Seeing a River is a prime example of an ambiguous thought. It is a fragment of his Life on the Mississippi (1883), which was pronounced as “Twain’s best book” by the best English critics (Budd 9). The author expresses his romantic and then pragmatic view of the same river. His writing technique is perfect; it is full of literature features such as epithets (“trifling”, “valuable”, “wonderful”, “smooth”, “graceful”, “sombre”, “woody”, “soft”, etc.), similes (“the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet”, “shone like silver”, “glowed like a flame”), metaphors (“the language of this water”, “I drank it in” (about that landscape), “the river turned to blood”, etc.), and others. The author drew an analogy between his first impression of the sunset on the river and his insight when the day came and he became older. He begins to compare and contrast his feelings and doubts whether that beauty was real or not. The excerpt of his work ends with several questions that stimulate the readers to think them over and seek for the answers.
Mark Twain’s masterpiece evokes unforgettable emotions over the readers; it makes them remember their first experience of seeing a river, a lake or a sea at sunset. It is obvious that the author wrote about his youth and prime impression of the steamboating when everything was new to him, and he was open to fresh feelings. At the beginning of the passage the writer says, “Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature…” (Twain). The key words here are ‘mastered’ and ‘had come to know’, which mean that he is already experienced and has lost his openness – something changed at that moment. He lost his innocence because of gaining knowledge and practice.
The last questions of the extract make the readers reconsider their attitude to doctors. Mark Twain feels pity for them and inquires whether they can see beauty and uniqueness in patients, or they just look for some defects and latent diseases. The readers begin to think the same. Before people read that passage, most of them thought about doctors positively. Their opinion could have changed after the reading. They could also ask themselves the same questions because it may be so that the doctors often discover the symptoms of the non-existent diseases in healthy patients. However, it is talked not about the doctors, but the beauty of nature and this is the main point of the essay.
The entity of the Two Ways of Seeing a River is that everything is controversial and has two opposite sides. There exists no unique meaning or view; there are always at least two of them. The same is here: the river is enjoyable and at the same time dangerous; its beauty can take people’s breath away, and it can lead to a disaster as well. Mark Twain wanted to portray this contrast, and he managed to do it extremely meritoriously.
It is necessary to add that the author’s hidden aim could be the following: every person should learn how to preserve his/her pure self-consciousness and see everything from different sides. The life consists of white and black streaks; however, only some people can examine various shades of gray and find something positive in negative. It is essential to keep this ability and remain a human in any situation. Only then, people could live a colorful life of full value and meet success and obstacles with dignity.
Works Cited
Budd, Louis J. Mark Twain. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.
Twain, Mark. “Two Ways of Seeing a River”. Two Ways of Seeing a River, By Mark Twain. Richard Nordquist. About.com Education, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
by evamckerr on 2023-01-06 10:41:31