In “The Flow of the River,” Loren Eiseley takes the reader on a symbolic adventure exploring man and nature. Eiseley relates two of his experiences in the outdoors: floating down the Platte River on his back and his short relationship with a talking catfish found frozen in the river. As Eiseley floats down the Platte, he ponders the natural beauty around him and the connection of the natural world and humans that water creates. A frozen catfish, assumed dead, becomes Eiseley’s ultimate metaphor for the correlation of man and nature. Through these experiences with elements of water, Eiseley explores the character of man and nature. Eiseley’s use of symbolism demonstrates that through water, man and nature are the same.
Water is a strong, recurring symbol in “The Flow of the River,” used to highlight the similarities of man and nature. As water is everywhere in the world, even in the driest of desert, it is everywhere within this essay. Water “touches the past and prepares the future,” for without water, there would be no life on Earth (Eiseley 257). Like man and nature, water takes on many shapes and forms: a simple, single drop, an immense frozen glacier, a flowing river, all one and the same substance yet all distinctly different entities. Water has sound and substance, character and personality, as do both man and nature. Water is within man as it is within every element of nature; it is the absolute, essential ingredient to all of existence as we know it. Water is man, water is nature, water is man and nature, man and nature are water: therefore, man and nature are the same, through the connection of water.
This symbolic connection between man, nature and water is revealed most effectively as Eiseley relates his experience floating down the Platte River. Floating on his back, he melds with the water, becoming a part of the river, simple flotsam floating on the river yet at the same time, a part of the river, an element of the river as essential as a single drop of water is to the river, yet at the same time is completely subjugated to the river. The parts become the whole and the whole is the parts. By describing the river and himself as a part of the river as he floats on it as “streaming alive” and “oozing secretively,” Eiseley effectively merges the two separate elements – himself and the river – into one single sentient being, an allegorical whole, as man and nature are two separate components that are together one whole being (259). Yet, at the same time, this merging demonstrates that water is the essential element that without, neither man nor nature could exist. Water can exist on its own: what man views as nature cannot exist without water, and man cannot exist without nature and water.
A frozen, miraculously resurrected talking catfish becomes the ultimate symbol of the integration of man and nature. This catfish, which Eiseley first refers to as “it” then refers to as “him” more than 14 times, has all the characteristics of a sentient human, from language to a brave personality and character as it “gambles like a man” to return to the home it has known throughout its life. Granted, it is an unsuccessful “fool’s gamble,” but it is a gamble demonstrative of the essential, gambling nature of man itself (261). As a “million ancestral years” has resulted in the natural world we know, it has also resulted in the human race, tying the two together as one and the same. The catfish is a symbol of nature, by its very existence as an element of the natural world as we view it; it is also a symbol of man, talking, sentient, and gambling man. The catfish is viewed as an equal to humans, as Eiseley converses with it, providing it with what it needs – a tank – and mourning his passing from this world, as he would mourn the passing of a friend; a friend that may eventually evolve into a species equivalent to humans by it’s “close relatives… experimenting with air breathing” (261). Of course, catfish do breath air in the form of water in their currently evolved form: this becomes yet another watery connection between man and nature.
Water nurtures and destroys, creates and devastates, and ultimately connects all of the disparate parts of the environment into one coexisting whole. It can overwhelm a man-made prairie schooner and a mammoth as easily as it creates the environment essential to the existence of a catfish and man (259). Without water, nothing else can exist. Through water, man and nature are essentially the same: man is as much of nature as nature is of man. We – humans – view ourselves as “outside” of nature, but we are as much a part of nature as a single drop of water.
Works Cited
Eiseley, Loren. “The Flow of the River.” One Hundred Great Essays. Ed. Robert Diyanni. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2002. 256-263.
Written for Professor Sutter's English Composition I class at Pikes Peak Community College, 27th March 2004
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