Not many people know that Mark Twain is a pseudonym the writer’s real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens, from now on referred to as Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri in November the 30th 1835. Twain was considered the father of North-American literature.
Twain wrote many novels and stories but the most famous are “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), and “the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
In his novel “A Cub Pilot” he tells an autobiographic story about him wanting to be a steamboat pilot. At the beginning of the story Twain is presented as an apprentice cub pilot working on a steamboat. The second character is Brown who is a pro pilot also working on the same boat. The two characters have a conflict from the start because Brown likes to pick on weaker and smarter boys. The problems grow due to the differences between the two characters. Twain and Brown have some differences and similarities in regards to their position. Twain is an apprentice, a cub pilot, and Brown is the boss, the pilot. Twain is under Brown to learn a few skills and Brown usually abuses the power; Twain is under stress because Brown keeps irritating him. Although Twain wanted to kill Brown, he had to hold back because he is a co-pilot. Nonetheless, Brown and Twain are both passionate in their job. That is why neither of them wanted to leave the ship.
The main idea of the passage from “A Cub Pilot” is that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, how many times you have practiced and done something, when you are under pressure, nervous or in a hurry; it is really difficult to see things for what they really are. It does not matter how experienced you can be, everybody can commit mistakes one in a while when under a lot of pressure. Sometimes you cannot see what you have seen before in equal circumstances. It a phenomenon I have coined as “Pressure Blindness”.
The sentence that can define my thesis is:
“I suppose I’ll never hear the last of how I was stupid enough to heave the lead at the head of 66.”
By stating this twain tries to explain how unbelievably blind, or stupid as he presents it, he was not to realize that everything he was doing was nonsense.