Clemens’ complex feelings about his piloting days provide insights into his imagination and his identity problems. Despite his nostalgia, Clemens feared the river and exorcised his fears by imaginatively identifying with Horace Bixby, his former steamboating master. Drawing upon his recollections for “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874, Clemens became a figurative master pilot, using the same order of memory that Bixby demands of the cub. Clemens’ 1882 river trip was motivated in part by an unconscious desire to recover his intuitive “Bixby memory”; he was searching for both his former master and his own imaginative self. The trip, however, was a sign that his intuitive memory had failed him and he was depending on direct observation. His “invocation” of the hateful pilot Brown (with his chaotic, literal memory) at the beginning of the 1882 writing of Life on the Mississippi foreshadows Clemens’ failure to achieve imaginative coherence in the second part of the book.