The Manipulative Power Of Words: The Okefenokee

It is not difficult to at first dismiss the similarities of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Homer’s Odyssey as entirely superficial. Both are examples of the narrative pattern of The Hero’s Journey; the Odyssey presented as an epic that was so influential it birthed the entire western cannon of story telling and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written in the tradition of the Great American Novel that defined the spirit of the age in the United States. Each respective hero embarks on a journey, encounters strange places and people, overcomes the odds they are confronted with, winning the day and ultimately returning home before their next adventure (Coupe). Beneath this pattern however, lie similarities so consistent, that one cannot help but wonder, did Twain use Homer’s Odyssey as a blueprint for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? By examining the story of Huck Finn’s trip down the Mississippi through the lens of the Odyssey, I endeavor to show how the deeper similarities between these two classics not only tie them together from centuries apart, but that the influence of Homer’s epic is alive and well in Twain’s novel.

In the first passage, the Okefenokee Swamp is described with a wide variety of diction. Its features are mentioned with a neutral tone and simply describe what the place looks like. In the second passage, Okefenokee Swamp is portrayed as an unpleasant setting with many disturbing features. Each passage describes the area with a different purpose and a different view. The first passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica has an objective tone, while the second passage has a detestable tone and is subjective.

Throughout Life On The Mississippi and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County the authors show many instances of how the authors wanted things in literature to be perceived as how they really were instead of being described as how they made someone feel or being dark about their description. While reading Life On The Mississippi Twain talks about how the captain of the boat was describing mile marker on the river and he says “they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque.” (Twain 2). This quote shows that the captain was describing these objects as they were meaningful to himself as Twain just saw the objects as what they were to him, just objects. This section of the text explains how writers were going to a form of

A leader has many responsibilities as a role model and caretaker for their people. Facing hard challenges and knowing how to deal with them is a part of being a great leader all of which are Chief Powhatan showed. Chief Powhatan whose proper name was Wahunsenacawh, was the superior chief of Tsenacommacah, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians in the Tidewater region of Virginia at the time English settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607. In his address to Captain John Smith Chief Powhatan expresses how he desires peace between the settlers and the Tsenacommacah. He utilizes distinct rhetorical elements such as rhetorical questions, diction and argumentation to further support his view on what he desired to occur between his people and the English settlers.

The author and esteemed Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle, in the essay, “The Flight from Conversation,” published in the New York Times on April 22, 2012 addresses the topic of conversation versus connection. It argues that technology is interfering with the ability to communicate. Turkle supports her claim first by using ethos to establish her credibility, second by using logos to provide her logic, and finally pathos to relate and move the reader. Turkle establishes a sentimental tone in order to appeal to her audience’s emotions on the topic. The author’s overall purpose is to persuade her audience to be together and to interact in person so that they will

Oliver starts off by using imagery to describe the struggle with the swamp as a sense of hardship, and challenge. Her descriptions utilizes dark diction such as “endless,” “wet,” “dark,” “pale,” “black,” “slack,” “pathless,” “seamless,” and ‘peerless”, which gives the reader a sense of hopelessness and despair. Oliver also uses enjambment to emphasize the swamp as a never ending trail and symbolize

Poetry, more than any other writing style, is filled to the brim with literary devices. These devices are used by the author to communicate their story. Mary Oliver’s, “Crossing the Swamp,” is a tale of one person’s struggles in crossing a swamp. Mary uses the techniques of descriptive language, metaphors, and personification to develop the relationship between the speaker and the swamp.

The first half of Life on the Mississippi was ideally written and reading the extremely detailed and captivating account of Twain's apprenticeship was quite enjoyable. However, the second part of the book was not as fascinating. The short stories were frequently only two pages long and were not very well connected to be a clear read. Though a few of the characters Twain met on his journey were quite interesting, the majority of them merely served as an example of a certain characteristic which he wished to further discuss. This may be due to the fact that Twain was much older by the time he made the trip in the second half of the book, and he had grown aware of the various faults of humanity and thus wrote more analytically and critically than he did in the first half to reflect his change in character and the change of the times he lived in.

In Mary Oliver’s “Crossing the Swamp”, the speaker compares a swamp to the struggles and hardships in life that fight against her. The speaker repeatedly contrasts herself to the swamp to emphasize the vastness of the swamp, conveying how the speaker understands the hardships that come with life.

In Crossing the Swamp, Mary Oliver exposes human nature to its simplest state; the passion for life present in the natural world transforms the individual by bringing one closer to the sublime. The spirituality teeming in Oliver’s swamp metaphorically represents hidden beauty within the mundane, as a call for shifted perspective and dignified appreciation permeates the passage.

Do you let greed blind you? The story “The Devil and Tom Walker” and the play, “The Crucible,” have very similar themes and for the most part the authors approach the themes in very similar way. In the play, they characters are trying to figure out who was the witch and who was associating with the devil. In the passage, a very selfish character, Tom Walker, approached the Devil and Tom Walker was going to trade his soul for money. The authors make the theme very clear by using similar literary devices like characterization, symbolism, imagery, and allegory.

Life consists of troubles and joys, ends and restarts. Mary Oliver’s “Crossing the Swamp” paints the speaker’s complex life through the characterization of a swamp. The poem shows that the swamp is a metaphor for the speaker’s life; its thick mud represents her hardships, while its growing branches symbolize her hopefulness. Through the volta in her poem, Oliver develops the speaker’s relationship with the swamp as a endless battle to a hopeful rebirth.

In “Crossing the Swamp”, Mary Oliver uses the Swamp as a metaphor for life’s struggles when she states “Here is swamp, here is struggle” and continues to expound on this metaphor throughout the poem. She relates the physical characteristics of the swamp to going through a struggle and her use of literary devices helps to drive this metaphor. Through her use of tone and imagery, Oliver is able to show the transition of the relationship between the speaker and the swamp(struggles) from one of hopelessness to one of hopefulness. At the beginning of the poem, the tone is very hopeless.

In the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain juxtaposes two environments that tackle many different aspects of life. From Christian reforms, domestic abuse, and slavery to reflective solitude and liberation, Twain brings together a plethora of obstacles for the main character Huckleberry Finn and his companion Jim to encounter and assimilate. The two contrasting settings depict intermingling themes of the repressive civilization on land, the unrestricted freedom on the raft, and the transcendentalism that Huck and Jim experience during their escape from captivity towards liberation.

Each witter has their own style and uses syntax and diction in different and unique ways. Chapter 12 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” written by Mark Twain both demonstrate a great American theme through the use of these three forms of writing. The novel and the short story consist of the first-person point of view style of writing, as well as patterned syntax sentences, and finally informal diction with polysyndeton.