Hank Morgan Finds the Flaw in Thomas Sutpen's "Design": Southern: American: Human

Abstract

As the stranger at Warwick Castle speaks, Mark Twain is willingly caught up in his romantic tales of the knights of the Round Table. Reading the stranger's manuscript, however, forces upon Mark Twain a view of the world of King Arthur and his knights quite different from the romantic ideal. In this respect, the appearance of Mark Twain in the frame of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court-the Word of Explanation and the P.S. by M.T.--can be considered a paradigm for William Faulkner's use of Quentin Compson in his novel Absalom, Absalom!. Quentin, too, is menaced by the experiences of people out of the past, experiences which shatter his idealized vision of the chivalric Old South. Although Everett Carter claims that Mark Twain identifies with Hank Morgan,2 it is more accurate to say that Mark Twain recognizes Hank Morgan's humanity, just as Quentin Compson comes to recognize that of Thomas Sutpen. James W. Gargano writes that A Connecticut Yankee looks backward and forward with final misanthropy upon a long perspective of human hopes, absurd effort, and insignificant achievement.3 As Quentin Compson hears the history of Thomas Sutpen and his family, as he pieces together the different accounts and hypothesizes the rest, and finally, as he, too, stands at the deathbed of a relic from the past, he is struck by the futility and potential destructive force of analogous shattered human hopes, absurd effort, and insignificant achievement, and begins to despair over the nature of mankind-past and present (and, implicitly, future). Together with Mark Twain and Quentin Compson, the reader is gradually faced with the unsettling realization that the forces which motivate Hank Morgan and Thomas Sutpen are not so enigmatic.