A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Style)

Style

Loose Structure

Twain has been faulted for the structure, or lack of structure, of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the broadest term, the story has a clear structure, beginning and ending with the speaker, Twain, visiting England, then introducing the character of the Yankee, and then settling into the story that the Yankee has written out, which takes up most of the book. The book returns to Twain at the end, at which point the Yankee dies.

Within the Yankee's story, however, there is little consistency. Plot elements begin and end haphazardly, characters enter and leave with little notice, and long episodes conveniently arise just as others end. The most egregious of these inconsistencies is the way that the character of Sandy disappears from the story some time around the Restoration of the Fountain, and then reappears, surprisingly, more than a hundred pages later, as Hank Morgan's wife and the mother of his child.

The plot's inconsistencies, and its segmented format, are attributed to the fact that Twain wrote this novel in sections, over the course of three years. Instead of having an organic unity that it would have if it were edited after the final section was written, the story was put together one piece at a time. The final product reflects a growing understanding of the implications of what started out as a light fantasy.

Setting

In some novels, setting is unimportant, but the setting is the whole reason for this book's existence. As an examination of Middle Age customs through modern sensibilities, it seems at first to be an indictment of the naïve notions that people had in the past. Because Twain is a careful and humane writer, though, the people of that time prove to be worthy of sympathy, despite their strange notions. King Arthur turns out to be a truly kind and stately person, and Merlin turns out to have supernatural power after all. Twain uses the bare outline of Arthurian legends, which often wax nostalgic for the loss of such chivalric customs as loyalty to the court, bravery among knights, and devotion to one's lady, and he infuses them with real-life problems, such as the court existing by exploiting peasant labor. Cutting through the haze of sentimentality that has surrounded these stories throughout the years allows Twain to create a setting that is at once familiar and new.