Cub Pilot On The Mississippi Summary

This sample essay on Cub Pilot On The Mississippi Summary provides important aspects of the issue and arguments for and against as well as the needed facts. Read on this essay’s introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Throughout “life on the Mississippi, Twain seeks to delay time, to make it pause long enough to make some sense of it, even as he realizes that death will end all speculation. -He writes of his day as a pilot that “time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed – and hoped – that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.

But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone” -Historical time interrupts the expectation that time will cease, that he ill always be a pilot, until the end of his time. And the river will always be there -This stable moment in time, an eternal River, is lonesome, alienating and disinterested in the affair Of mankind -Throughout “Life on the Mississippi” the evident nostalgia for the river long gone pervades Twain’s discussion of it.

In particular, the monopoly enjoyed by the Pilots’ Benevolent Association for a few short years before the Civil War occupies Chi. 5 RL Twain’s lifetime fascination with American capitalism also becomes apparent here. (Remarks: “This union of pilots was perhaps the compacters, the employees, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men”) -In the end, however, the association collapses -Twain sketches out, how the railroad and the Civil War decrease trade on the river, until “behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the death an pathetic past” – When Twain visits his boyhood home and village, all seems changed.

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A Cub Pilot By Mark Twain

The town has grown, it is no longer a village; it is a city -first he ignores the new houses and “sees” the vanished houses which had formerly stood there and topographically shakes hands with former people = timeless dream -Twain needs to resort to his memory and his reconstruction of it in order to accept these changes to his town and to his past: “l woke up every morning with the impression that was a boy – in my dreams the faces where young again; but I went to bed a 100 years old, every night – for meantime I had been seeing the faces as they are now D represents a timeless moment, each morning a nostalgic recovery of the past, one that retreats into an aged and weary vision of the present -Twain’s trip to the past, to see how the Great River has hanged over the years, has become a burden of identity, for clearly he would likely sympathize, more so the Southern reader who would be remembering what it was like; through the perspectives o idyllic distortion, before the Civil War -The early chapters of “Life on the Mississippi” demonstrate the book learning and book knowledge of the historian, a kind of traditional travel material suitable for the reader who wants dry facts about the history of the great river, particularly its early explorers. Throughout the text: facts about cities and towns along the river, numbers of people , amounts of goods hipped, but these facts, though they demonstrate useful information about the river, do not show how knowledge ought to be used. The way knowledge ought to be used is part of the cub pilots training, a knowledge that becomes intuitive, almost instinctual and unconscious. -The new river that Twain explores has changed so much so that modern technology “has knocked the romance out of piloting’. Lamps have been installed along the river; snag boats clear the river from hazard. -The knowledge required in 1882 to be a riverboat pilot now lies in charts devised by Horace Boxy and George Ritchie, ND not in the memory banks of the pilot.

Uncle uniform’s monologue: They wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another -fear of disappearance of the noble landmarks -Knowledge that ass been stored has become useless -Changes that have occurred along the river since the Civil War: Twain intents to explain the corruption of the South before the Civil War and the decay of the Southern culture, still dependent on that form of knowledge, after the great War between the States C] Most of these changes have been economic -Clearly, “L … Mississippi” is a record of the destruction of the South, even if it remises to be a remembrance of the life that Twain Once had on the banks of the river -Since the moment Hernandez De Sotto and his party of conquistadores first arrived at the banks of the Mississippi in 1 541 m travelers of every variety have flocked to and along this representative river to better comprehend the country thorough which it flows. Both as a conduit for trade and travel, and a destination in its own right, the rivers role in national life has changed dramatically over the centuries. It no longer commands the social and economic powers of its antebellum zenith.

Nevertheless, it mutinous to occupy a unique place in American travel writing – and the American consciousness. -T. S. Eliot appreciated the rivers powers even William Least Heat-Moon, a child of the Missouri who has attempted in his own eatable “to testify to the capital allure Of rivers other than the Mississippi,” has conceded its “encompassing mystique” that “still hold us in a grand cultural thrall”. The Mississippi remains a vital location in the symbolic geography of America. -Mark Twain understood the river’s symbolic nature. He was taught the lesson while learning to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi; what he learned remains fundamental for successfully piloting a course through the rivers manifold representations.

He came to understand that there were to rivers: The physical Mississippi of the imagination, meandering through the mind. For a steamboat pilot, the imagined Mississippi rook precedence. Horace Boxy Twain’s piloting mentor, instructed him: “you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, and never mind the one that’s before your eyes” –The story of Mississippi travel writing can, in one sense , quickly be told in an apparently circular list of its hanging modes Of transport. The canoes Of those attempting to navigate the river’s course today. If each era’s travel writing had been defined by a mode of transport, its concomitant relationship with the river has been profoundly different. The river has also been an enigma and an emblem of imperialism.

The essential highway of a young nation moving west; the real of profit, increasing arbitration, slavery, and war; a limbo of lost splendor and increasing dismissal; the scene of imaginative resurrection; an escape route to a forgotten America; and, today, an arena in which to test personal limits. The most significant accounts of the Mississippi have been able to assess the river with a profound awareness of its history, and yet still see it with acute, contemporary eyes -The early travel accounts that resulted severe a double role: they fueled imperial desire, and the established certain paradigmatic relationships between the travelers and the river. Broken dreams and ruined fortunes soon littered its banks -Charles Dickens was disappointed expected more -The river, already under serve pressure from the railroads in the sass, was arced to close its waters at the advent of the Civil War. Travel writing was displaced by military dispatch -When the river was again opened for freight and passenger traffic, it flowed through a very different landscape. Slavery was gone, the railroads Were dominant, and the steamboat trade was suffering from mortal wounds -The rivers cultural life was about to begin anew: all because the Civil War forced a young steamboat pilot in the trade’s last flush years.

Then he headed West and became Mark Twain -He was the only one back then who wrote about the Mississippi -first 3 chapters deal with geography and the river’s history; after those follow the chapters of the pilot- memories.