Satire with Teeth

The King and the Duke, two conmen who join the raft, represent the fraudulence pervading so-called civilized society. They stage fake Shakespeare, sell fake religion, and exploit every community they enter. The novel's repeated use of racial slurs was deliberate — Twain wanted the ugliness of everyday racism to be impossible to ignore or sanitize.

The discomfort modern readers feel when encountering this language was exactly Twain's intention. He deployed the most offensive words of his era to show how casually dehumanizing speech was woven into the fabric of everyday American life — so common that decent people used it without a second thought.