At the age of 72, Vonnegut wrote an Introduction in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a 1996 printing by Oxford University Press of Mark Twain's 1889 novel.
Summary[]
Original Frontispiece to "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
When "in their sunset years", novelists commonly find a second story in works of fiction by great writers—the author's views on themselves and life itself while writing the book. When writing this book, Twain was 53, a "self-educated son of nobodies" who was somehow seen by his contemporary society as wise, charming, and a master of the English language. Five years earlier he had written Huckleberry Finn, which Vonnegut finds "as comically profound as the masterpiece Don Quixote", and Twain knew that he may never be that lucky again. But he needs money. His explanation that the Yankee got back to the sixth century by being hit in the head is lazy, and the character's foreknowledge of a coming total eclipse to prove his power is absurd. Twain's excuse that he was writing under deadline is evidence that he wanted money as soon as possible, especially since he was losing a great amount of it just then from bad investments.
As the book continues, however, it gets much better and Twain must have felt some of the "pride and excitement" of his earlier works. Along with the works of Jules Verne, Twain's time travel plot is inventing the genre of science fiction. Despite its weak beginning, the premise itself—about a modern man surviving thirteen hundred years in the past—set in motion a literary experiment with unpredictable results, at least if the author is being "honest and open-minded, until the end". Perhaps Twain himself was "both startled and grimly satisfied" with the conclusion that optimism and technology, especially that of modern warfare, can "only make a bad situation worse". This experiment was first conducted in the American Civil War when Twain was young, and on a greater scale in World War I, four years after his death. Despite missing both World Wars, Twain by the time of this book had clearly concluded that "the human condition was hopeless" even in peacetime.[1]
See Also[]
- "Mark Twain", a speech given at Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut on April 30, 1979, mentioning this novel, collected in Palm Sunday
- "Opening Remarks in The Unabridged Mark Twain", an introduction to a 1976 collection of Twain's works, also mentioning this work
- ↑ "Introduction", A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1996), pp. xxxi-xxxiii.