In the infancy of humanity, rivers were great obstacles. They presented a new problem, new tools required in order to achieve a solution, and a new method of getting to that solution. That’s what Mark Twain and Stephen Vincent Benét brought with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and By the Waters of Babylon respectively. In them the protagonists, Huck Finn and John son of John, overcome a series of obstacles in order to achieve the truth they desired . While both authors did an excellent job in the creation of an immersive world, By the Waters of Babylon paints a world eerily similar to our own. It enlightens us with topics that show how apparently close we are to a world where the Dead Places exist, and the world can be if we continue to
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Babylon mainly emphasizes on the quest for the truth with phrases like “‘ Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places’”. It shows that you want to move forward, you are the person who needs to be in control, not others. Huck Finn, on the other hand, has many little things on its checklist it wants to tick off by the time the reader is finished with the book. Sometimes it doesn’t always seem the most unbiased book while doing that, an example being the how it sometimes criticizes the Church for some of its ways of teaching, saying that during the aftermath from the sermon of brotherly love in the little Church in the Shepherdson- Grangerford affair was “... pretty ornery teaching… but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they talked about it over going home…”. This shows that people think that the Church is important, but the information isn’t relevant in their lives because they are mere riverfolk who can’t do such things, thus later battling it out in a scene that could’ve been taken out of a play. It is a note to the Church that these aren’t children to lecture, but adults that won’t just yield because you said to once. This is also in the same line of thought as the deer statement in Babylon, but also brings up the Church’s problems, which can be distracting to the main point of what …show more content…
You need to see how your river works before you can even think about how to get over it. Huck Finn, showcases this by making Huck travel down a river that changes constantly, and brings him to different places where different stories are made. By the Waters of Babylon brings out John having to go through a rough wilderness, and leading to a bitterly harsh and cold river to face the end. He has to face it in order to finally earn the truth. That is why By the Waters of Babylon is better; it expresses the feeling of finding the truth that breaks your life apart, it absolutely changes you, and your outlook on how life is to be lived. It is one of the single most important things to learn while young, in order to not be pulled under by the currents of lies and deception. To cross a river is to find the truth, and that is what we must always do. It’ll be challenging, and the results potentially devastating, but it is the truth, and better to know the truth than to live on a
Babylon mainly emphasizes on the quest for the truth with phrases like “‘ Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places’”. It shows that you want to move forward, you are the person who needs to be in control, not others. Huck Finn, on the other hand, has many little things on its checklist it wants to tick off by the time the reader is finished with the book. Sometimes it doesn’t always seem the most unbiased book while doing that, an example being the how it sometimes criticizes the Church for some of its ways of teaching, saying that during the aftermath from the sermon of brotherly love in the little Church in the Shepherdson- Grangerford affair was “... pretty ornery teaching… but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they talked about it over going home…”. This shows that people think that the Church is important, but the information isn’t relevant in their lives because they are mere riverfolk who can’t do such things, thus later battling it out in a scene that could’ve been taken out of a play. It is a note to the Church that these aren’t children to lecture, but adults that won’t just yield because you said to once. This is also in the same line of thought as the deer statement in Babylon, but also brings up the Church’s problems, which can be distracting to the main point of what …show more content…
You need to see how your river works before you can even think about how to get over it. Huck Finn, showcases this by making Huck travel down a river that changes constantly, and brings him to different places where different stories are made. By the Waters of Babylon brings out John having to go through a rough wilderness, and leading to a bitterly harsh and cold river to face the end. He has to face it in order to finally earn the truth. That is why By the Waters of Babylon is better; it expresses the feeling of finding the truth that breaks your life apart, it absolutely changes you, and your outlook on how life is to be lived. It is one of the single most important things to learn while young, in order to not be pulled under by the currents of lies and deception. To cross a river is to find the truth, and that is what we must always do. It’ll be challenging, and the results potentially devastating, but it is the truth, and better to know the truth than to live on a