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twain on rivers, seas
"Mark Twain’s tale is one of the great depictions of discovery through travel. The power of this depiction comes not just from Twain’s storytelling skill, but from the element he chooses to give structure to the story: the river, which conveys Huck and Jim through one scene of adventure after another. T. S. Eliot found this device so powerful that he dubbed it “the River God,” claiming that “a river, a very big and powerful river, is the only force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.” For Huck and Jim, this determination of their course becomes a source of hope, of the possibility of escape from their wretched lives: for Jim, it is a hope for freedom from the miseries of slavery, and for Huck, from his life under a poor, abusive father. And they hope not just to escape their old lives but to find new ones — a broader moral hope that can be felt by the readers who enter imaginatively into the story, who come to apprehend this possibility for discovery and renewal in themselves."
I like the idea of Elliots, that "a very big and powerful river, is the only force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination" but I like it more when applied to the sea.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/gps-and-the-end-of-the-road
"Seen in the right way, what the two novels show us is not the virtue of quitting civilization, but the freedom that comes from finding our own way through a world that is not of our own making — and with it, a glimpse of the possibility of reaching out beyond our everyday selves into something greater. And the progression from Huck Finn to On the Road suggests that the advance of technology and civilization need not spell the end of this possibility, but just the shift of its scenes."
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