Much has been said about this, one of Twain's less well known texts, regarding allusions to the divided America of Twain's age: the knight-errantry of Camelot that Twain derides is a mirror of the proud and genteel American south; the pitiable English slaves are a thin disguise for Twain's contempt for American slavery; the inevitable routing of Camelot by the rational protagonist's forces lay bare Twain's notion that the old customs of the American south were doomed to failure. However, where Twain's most famous work - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - is almost entirely dedicated to the moral dilemmas of the north/south conflict, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court puts on display many other bits of Twain's multi-faceted persona.
Anyone familiar with Twain's personal history will know that he was an unrepentant gambler of funds when it came to investing in new ideas and inventions. Unfortunately, history proves Twain's business sense to be lacking and he is recorded to have lost much more than he ever gained on his investments. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that the narrator is a whiz at both invention and marketing, traits that serve him well in his bid to relieve Arthurian England of its undemocratic royal yoke. This design to upend the engines of instituted inequality is also on conspicuous display with the narrator's attitude toward the Catholic church of England, an authority structure that Twain has not one good word for. In fact, unlike Twain's other famous literary figures (Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, for instance), the narrator of this tale, dubiously known as "The Boss", is unequivocally Twain himself. Although both Tom and Huck contain bits of Twain's authorial presence, they are their own young men as well, full of character and life, drawn from Twain's own experiences and acquaintances on the Mississippi.
And it is in this story's distance from that river that Twain is most humbled as a writer. Although it is quite certain that Twain had a fascination with Arthurian legend and was a voracious reader of the stories that espoused them (a trait that also shows up in Tom Sawyer), there is no doubt that the author's distance from the reality of those texts hinders his own story's development. Whereas Twain's tales of the river draw on his first-hand, intimate knowledge of that area and its people, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court is left to flounder as a humorous reinterpretation of stories that, themselves, were written without connection to any of the settings and events that they detail. Arthurian legend is, of course, fantasy, but where Twain's river characters are rich with personal motive and independent life, Twain's Camelot characters are decidedly distant, removed from the world of the river that Twain knew so well and left out to dry. In truth, they are really only shells of characters, with the sort of development one would expect in one of today's summer blockbusters (which is to say, none at all), and as such none of them stick with the narrator for very long, each largely having worn out his depth in the expanse of a chapter or two. Only The Boss, himself, is a constant presence, and he seems to serve mainly as an outlet for Twain's discontent with the power structures of the social world, also removed from the river, that he had grown to so disdain as an adult.
This is not to say, of course, that the story is worthless. Anyone familiar with Twain's essays and other non-fiction work would be hard pressed to argue that he is anything other than humorous and charismatic to the point of enchantment, and this relentlessly dry wit comes to the front of The Boss' asides to the reader, too. The matter is simply that one would rather encounter Twain's own voice in just such a non-fiction forum and avoid the many tedious pages of thin, time-traveler jokes and boring, under-wrought English characters. However, given that Twain is not currently producing volumes of new material, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court certainly provides one more, happy chance to revel in Twain's literary lambasting of the often farcical human world that he did, and that we still do, inhabit.
