...continued...

Yet the voice Twain uses to relate his adventure is consistently self-depreciating. He likes nothing better than to poke fun at himself (to say nothing of his fellow travelers). For example, he repeats a long diatribe by the landsman of the Paul Jones which is composed (we infer) mostly of swearing, and the young Twain concludes wistfully "I wished I could talk like that" (Twain, "Life," 28). Later in that same chapter, Twain writes that he made friends with the ship’s night watchman, who tells Twain he’s had a terrible life. "He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the son of an English nobleman -- either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to "one of them old, ancient colleges" -- he couldn’t remember which" (Twain, "Life" 28)

Light Analysis: Now, an earl is indeed a type of English nobleman, but an alderman is a minor civil official -- not a nobleman at all. And although the word "college" is, in England at least, often applied to boarding schools for young boys or girls, it is extremely unlikely that a person attending such an institution would be so young that he couldn’t remember the name of the school -- or that he would emerge from this kind of institution saying "one of them . . . colleges". Clearly, the night watchman has pulled the wool over young Twain’s eyes -- something Twain does not realize until he is much older, though he has the ability to convey it to the reader in the narrator’s own voice.

Conclusive Remarks: A similar literary phenomenon occurs in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for example, in Chapter Nine when Tom and his friend Huck go out into a graveyard to perform a sort of midnight spell using a dead cat; this, they believe, will rid them of warts. There, unseen and undetected, they become witnesses to a murder. Terrified, they run to an abandoned tannery, where a stray dog wanders onto the scene. The boys interpret this as an omen of approaching death for whomever the dog faces, giving us a penetrating look into the belief systems to which these boys subscribe. Just as they are completely confident that dead cats can be used to remove warts, they are also completely confident that the appearance of the dog means that Divine Judgment is looming before them, and they should have behaved better when they had a chance. The juxtaposition of superstition with Christian theology -- both systems in which Huck and Tom devoutly believe -- is touching in its innocence....