During the journey from Virginia to England, Equiano is for the first time treated less brutally and inhumanely than he had been before (even though he’s still, of course, unfree). In part because of this, and in part because of his budding friendship with Dick, Equiano begins to warm to the white people and to their culture and customs that had initially so frightened him. Here Equiano describes watching Pascal and Dick reading together, but he describes it using the technique of defamiliarization, in which objects and situations that seem normal or obvious to a reader are described in a…