Life on the Mississippi-Twain
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In Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, we are presented with more than the tales and adventures of a young cub-pilot with aspirations of being a steamboatman. For in this particular story we are getting more than fiction from the author, we are getting a personal recollection aided by fiction that takes us deeper into the mind and ideology of the narrator than is typically true with pure fiction. Even though the boy’s father is a justice of the peace with the “power of life and death over all men,” the narrator remains more fascinated over his aspirations to ride the mighty and mysterious Mississippi. Horace Bixby is the riverboat pilot who “learns” the boy the river, a man who is as adept as finding obscured plantations along as the Mississippi as much as spewing forth cuss words in a torrent as raging as any ever whipped up by the river. He tells the boy, who offends him by having no memory of things taught, “You must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C” (Twain 169). However much the story contains fiction, it also contains an equal dose of reality. Samuel Clemens was a steamboatman as a teenager, and like Clemens the story’s fiction and reality are synonymous with life along the Mississippi. Clemens also kept a “memorandum-book” during his own steamship
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aying that often we achieve things greater than our capacities to achieve because we begin a goal or objective without having full knowledge of all the obstacles or challenges it may present—obstacles and challenges that often reveal hidden resources of strength and courage we might have been unaware we possessed. By mixing reality and fiction, by using a pseudonym to dramatize his own character as a character, Clemens style and technique in this story provide us with more than the mind and worldview of the cub pilot but also those of the author to a greater degree than pure fiction normally would. As a reviewer for The North American Review wrote in 1901:
The personal books of Mark Twain have not only the charm of the essay’s inconsequent and desultory method, in which invention, fact, reflection, and philosophy wander after one another in any following that happens, but they are of an immediate and most informal hospitality which admits you at once to the author’s confidence, and makes you frankly welcome not only to his through but to his way of thinking. He takes no trouble in the matter, and he asks you to take none. All that he requires is that you will have common sense, and be able to tell a joke when you see it. Oth
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1839
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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