Customer Reviews

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

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As with all of Mark Twain's work this book works on two very different levels. The first of course is a simple adventure story the second is a bitingly satiric work that unmasks many of the hypocracies of "conventional wisdom".

I have to believe that most of his readers of his time (and ours) did not understand his underlying messages regarding society and its institutions. For me, it was hard to miss the way he unmasked the church, the state and society as a whole. I had to laugh out loud at some of the ways he managed to expose the absurdities of government and religion.

This book is a quick read and is immensely satisfying if the reader takes the time to follow Twain's logic to its natural conclusions.

What else can be said about Twain except great story. Imaginative work paralleling medieval England with Industrial America in the lat 19th century. Witty, adventurous and well written. I have yet to read a Twain book I disliked.

The story is classic. In the chapter regarding the burial of a freeman there is a remarkable defense of the Terror during the French Revolution. Worth reading and perhaps even including as a source should you ever chance to write a paper on the beheading of poor king Louis.

Ordered it and received it in perfect condition and on time. Just as I have come to expect. Thanks

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. What can I say? The title of this review pretty much explains it all. Yet, odds are it could just be me. It is most likely that my complaints are based on opinion, as there is not too much fact within the topic of the quality of literature. The story, which is a cliché-spawner (more on this later), is about a "Connecticut Yankee" who is not properly named for most of the plot. In the preface, the Yankee, mostly referred to as "The Boss", is clonked on the head by a crowbar and miraculously wakes up over one thousand centuries prior. Medieval Times soon turns to be a harsh place for the Yankee, instantly reducing him to the status of a slave. By using his prior knowledge of the date of a solar eclipse, he convinces the higher powers of the land (and everyone else in those times), that he is of magical roots. It is here that we witness one of the biggest thematic sequences of the book. The Yankee is befuddled by the naïve nature of the English population, and as an effect, continues to take advantage of this facet of medieval life. The Yankee himself is a very clever character, as we first see with his usage of the solar eclipse, and then again when he "MacGyver's" together a lightning rod and gunpowder to exterminate Merlin the Wizard's tower. Actions such as this could be easily compared to the antics of Twain's other character, Huckleberry Finn. The Yankee goes through several years with trying to conduct Industrial change years before any such events would have occurred. The push for change continues when The Yankee takes on a quest to help a woman by the name of Alisande, or Sally. On a quest to save a number of maidens, they happen upon two ordinary peasants. Eating breakfast with them, The Yankee questions them about the idea of a more modern democracy, planting the seed for rebellion. The climax of the novel comes when a Tournament with a knight ends with The Yankee displaying his future weaponry in the form of a revolver, in which he uses to shoot his opponent and 9 other knights dead. In turn, he reveals his underground 19th century movement upon the world. In efforts to not give away the ending, I'll stop there. In my opinion, the plot here is one of random events that all concur to the same centralized theme. While this sounds fine in theory, the actual execution of such a technique is hardly appropriate. I found novels such as Huckleberry Finn much more approachable and I was able to enjoy it more, as the plot was much more rich and fun. I would probably recommend this book to someone looking for a satire of history, more than someone looking for a story with a fantastic plot.

I had to read this book for a college class, I thought it was one of Twain's worst, and that comes from someone who loves many of Twain's other works. In fact for my essay I compared this work to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain uses the dialect of the people in King Arthur's time, and sometimes it can get very confusing. I skipped over several paragraphs just because I couldn't make any sense of it. As long as Twain isn't using the dialect of that time the story line is very good. I found it annoying how Twain over played the stupidity of people of King Arthur's time.

From what I've read, The Prince and the Pauper was Twain's first foray into historical fiction. He clearly reused one of the major themes from that book in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which was published seven years later - that of a royal who gets a chance to see how the other half lives. In the earlier book, the prince and a young beggar exchange clothes for fun. In this book, it probably isn't realistic to make a full-grown man exchange clothes with another for the fun of it, so Twain gives the somewhat flimsy excuse that the protagonist (who has become the king's right-hand man after traveling back in time) has decided to go see the kingdom in disguise, and the king has decided to go with him. There was almost no more discussion of it than that - I don't think Twain ever mentioned whether the rest of the king's court knew what he was doing. Certainly no search parties are ever sent for him, but it's strange that everyone would let him just go off with basically no protection.

In any case, Twain's dislike of sixth-century England is very clear, although, he has ascribed many social behaviors to it that did not actually occur at that time. He even admits to this in a strange preface. At one point, he says, "Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and only actually great man in that whole British world." Now, I understand that the protagonist, being from 19th century England, has thirteen centuries of knowledge more than the "children" he references, but it's still pretty pompous to claim that much advantage over an entire kingdom.

The protagonist finds the king extremely stupid and doesn't miss an opportunity to mention it. The protagonist himself does a number of stupid things, including getting himself and the king sold into slavery, but somehow those are just little mistakes; whereas the king's inability to pretend to be a commoner because he has really never had the opportunity or reason to study one, of course, proves that the king is an idiot. In The Prince and The Pauper, the prince returns to his throne with a greater knowledge of his people and rules that much better for it. In this book, the king returns to his throne and then Twain is a little too busy with creating a way for his protagonist to get back to the nineteenth century to really discuss what happens to the king after his escapades.

This was fun to read but personally, I prefer The Prince and the Pauper.

Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee might well be read as the first novel of the Viet Nam War. Hank Morgan's intent to both dominate and liberate Arthurian England, and to "rescue" a supposedly benighted country so that it might become an image of the United States, foreshadows the American Exceptionalism that took us into Viet Nam and, later, into Iraq. When Arthurian England decides it does not want to be liberated, or to become like the United States, Hank in a fit of temper destroys a culture, using American technology to bring about its ruin. Those who remember the infamous quote from Viet Nam, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," will see it dramatized in Mark Twain's prescient classic.