The Face Of Water In Mark Twain's Life On The Mississippi

In the short story Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain it shows his experiences and his surroundings on the Mississippi river. His perspective changes while traveling the river. He sees the river as a passenger, but he also sees it as a pilot, because the pilot sees beauty and the danger in the the river. Twain shows his experience and change in viewpoint from seeing the beauty, to seeing the danger while traveling on the Mississippi river. In the beginning he beginning of the passage he compared the water to a book that only a few can read by saying “ The face of water, in time, became a wonderful book-- a book that was a dead language to understand to uneducated passengers….” (Twain) He was interested in the water because it had …show more content…
All the passenger sees is a rainbow with brightly colored skies, while the captain sees the early sign of an hurricane. He says in this quote “... to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earest of reading-matter.” (Twain) He starts to understand what is happening, and everything he say before disappears. “All the grace, beauty, the poetry, had gone out ogf the majestic river.” (Twain) He describes how the river morphed into something that it was not before. The river turned into a blood red color, and the middle of the water was just red. The water was boiling unlike the soothing graceful curves it had before. He was becoming frightened by what became of the river. The river was dangerous and he feared that the river sink someone’s boat. He sees that there is a log floating in the water, that indicates that the river is rising. “ No, thr romance and beauty were all gone from the river.”( Twain). All the beauty and grace that he saw in the river before is gone. The sees the beauty and the pain in the river, but realizes there is more dangers than beauty in the