Literarure Essay This fragment belongs to Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn, the narrator is the character himself, Huckleberry and he is portraying his own point of view of what is happening. The characters who appear in this fragment are the protagonist, his friend Jim and the two men who are supposed to be from a higher social class. The younger one is explaining them that he is the Duke of Bridgewater From the first lines we can realize that Jim is feeling uncomfortable and surprised at the same time, because he did not expect them to be from royalty, taking into account that he is a slave. The evidence in the text is: ‘’Jim’s eyes bugged out when he heard that;’’ and ‘’No! You can’t mean it?’’. So, we have here the picture of slavery. We can also notice that this man uses an arrogant tone when he is telling them the story about his life: ‘’I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater, and here am I’’ to make them feel inferior and to feed his own ego. However, the striking fact is that he will achieve his two apparent goals which are being treated as a duke by Jim and Huck and making them feel sorry for him: ‘’Jim pitied him ever so much’’. This brings us to the idea of submission as well because, even when this man has offended them in a way ‘...and here am I...degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft!’, Jim and Huck treat him with respect calling him ‘Your grace’, ‘My Lord’ or ‘Your Lordship’. It is reasonable to think that Huck does not really believe this man, he pretends to be ignorant and innocent, and satisfy the duke because it does not take him too much effort, it is a kind of indifference: ‘Well, that was all easy, so we done it.’ In conclusion, I want to point out the representation of those two men as the ambitious society and the raft as the passport to freedom, being away from those people corrupted by civilization. In this paragraph, as we have seen, there is a man who is supposed to be civilized but he is a liar, and the two children who are supposed to be savages but they know the meaning of respect. In other words, the raft which is Jim and Huck’s refuge, is attacked by the aristocracy.