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Through the combination of these two writing techniques, Twain presents us a vivid picture of that faraway age of 6 century and the age he lives in. By employing several contracts, he depicts the conflicts between the classes, the languages and the two totally disparate ages, and through the use of symbolism, he invests his characters with symbolic meanings, both of which have added profundity to his humor and satire since readers will always find underlying messages behind Twain’s frolicsome jokes and sharp irony.
2.2 Humor and Satire Embodied in Three Basic Novelistic Elements
As we all know, character, plot and setting are the three basic elements of a novel, with character functioning as the core, plot the framework and setting the support of the entire novel. A successful novel must be the one which have given thorough consideration to all the three aspects. Therefore, apart from the above mentioned writing techniques, analyzing these three novelistic elements in A Connecticut Yankee will carve out a new angle in understanding Twain’s skilful art of humor and satire.
2.2.1 The Portrayal of Characters: Emphasizing Psychological Description and Inner Contradictions
Firstly, a large proportion of the humor, be it light or dark in A Connecticut Yankee is revealed through the psychological description of the characters, especially that of the protagonist Hank Morgan, since much of the narration is done by him. Actually, his inner activities move the story along. For instance, when Hank is going to be burned at the stake, he suddenly recalls the trick of using the natural eclipse to get himself out of the trouble:
You see, it was the eclipsehow Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump onceand I saw my chance I could play it myself, now; and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties. (36)
This extract shows Hank’s self-satisfied idea of an eclipse and the wisecrack about “plagiarism” conveys Hank’s humorous spirit under his bones as well as Twain’s light humor during the first half of the novel. Such larkish inner monologue of Hank will always make readers laugh under the influence of Hank’s relaxed and joking attitudes towards various events. Similar psychological descriptions of Hank are easy to be found in the novel. When travelling in search of adventures with Sandy, he complains to himself about the heavy burden of full armor, the changeable English weather and the gossiping of Sandy during the whole trip. When restoring the holy fountain, his excitement and complacency after successfully playing his “special effect” are fully depicted through his psychological description as he chuckles to himself, “It was a great night, an immense night. There was reputation in it. I could hardly get to sleep for glorying over it.” Big wit and gentle whimsy can often be seen in these psychological descriptions and humor has been an eternal keynote.
However, with meeting Morgan Le Fay as a watershed, the previous light-hearted humor changes to a dark and bitter one because Hank gradually finds out the dark side of the 6th century Britain—the miserable life of common people and the privileges and cruelty of the aristocracy. Moreover, through his psychological descriptions in the second half of the novel, we can see that Hank begins to show his own dark side as he tries to build his Man factory secretly and set out to transform the whole country under his control by eliminating whoever stands in the way. Take the battle of the Sand Belt as an example, in this last battle Hank has electrocuted twenty-five thousand knights with modern electric circuit, and he is on cloud nine when seeing himself “enclosed in three walls of dead bodies”. His heart is filled with excitement as he thinks:
it was a man—a dim great figure in armorwith both hands on the upper wire—and of course there was a smell of burning flesh. Poor fellow, dead as a doornail, and never knew what hurt him. He stood there like a statue—no motion about him, except that his plumes swished about a little in the night wind. (336)