Mark Twain Research Paper

Writers take us places. Sometimes to places we don't want to go. Through their written

words, they take us on voyages of imagination and self-discovery. And in some cases, they

change us. Mark Twain lived in an ever-changing America, witnessing and chronicling the

horrors and splendor of man along the way. His innate understanding and social commentary of

the events that transformed him have, in effect, transformed us. As a 'cradle to the grave'

skeptic, his keen eye has criticized the untouchable institutions of his day and taught the coming

generations of a better way to live.

In Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Letters from the Earth, we are exposed to

the reflective Twain, the mortal looking back upon his life, and the immortal looking forward

toward his future. These two works illustrate his biting satire with regards to the mortal and

spiritual institutions that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, shape our lives. His incisive

rationale also inspires us to look deeper into ourselves as we would look deeper into his works.

Life on the Mississippi chronicles, what could be argued as, the most gratifying period in

Twain's life, his life as a riverboat pilot. He loved the river and what it had come to represent in

so many different forms. It was a childhood companion, a nexus between civilization and the

frontier, the watery turnpike to the Northern and Southern worlds. But it also represented a brief

respite from the ever-present supremacy of religion, for this career relied on its anti-thesis,

instinct.

Bixby had guided him, showing him the path to mastering the mighty Mississippi. "I

can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally know one from the other, but you

will never be able to explain why or how you know them apart." (Doyno, 1995, p. 155) To the

devout skeptic that was Twain, this was a feast for a starved soul. It became the moral imperative

that guided his life as well as the others that looked to his wisdom.

To Twain, the river was a place that beheld a majestic splendor so compelling that the

scriptures could not. It was the language of nature that captivated him, as it would a modern-day

environmentalist. "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a

dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve,

delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them without a voice. And it was

not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout

the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that

you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could

find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by

man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with

every re-perusal." (Doyno, 1995, p. 155) The subtle inference that Nature, God's true book, was

the more gratifying text is a powerful notion that any modern day reader can appreciate.

The river was a place that represented Life and Death to him. It was where the baptized

were reborn. It was where Lem Hackett, his childhood friend, had drowned. As a child, it was his

plaything. As a pilot, it was his workplace. It was where his dream died. "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 ended. But by and by the war came, commerce

was suspended, my occupation was gone." (Doyno, 1995, p. 173) The lesson that the madness of

war cannot alter the course of a river, but it can alter the course of our lives is a profound lesson

that remained imprinted on his soul.

As an unrepentant skeptic, Twain abhorred books that invoked hypocrisy and the falsely

revered institutions. Aside from the Bible, no book stoked the fires of his ire more than Ivanhoe,

by Sir Walter Scott. "His Ivanhoe singlehandedly re-inflamed Americans' love for now irrelevant

supernatural religion, superstitions, damsels in distress, kings and chivalry and made Southerners

think that their aristocratic ways were something special." (Killough, n.d., p. xx-xx)

Twain's assessment of "Sir Walter's" book espoused a chivalric code, which, he felt, was

outdated and responsible for the South's post-war legacy. "The South was poverty-stricken,

barren of any progress...except in the arts of war, murder, and massacre, the South had

contributed nothing."