One of Twain's most frequently used narrative techniques involves the innocent narrator taking a journey and encountering various adventures. In Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, Huck Finn, Innocents Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, and many other works, the concept of the narrator on a journey prevails. Here, we have the nineteenth-century Yankee traveling through sixth-century England, and his adventures are in the form of a series of contrasts. They are interesting reversals of Cervantes's Don Quixote, a novel that Twain greatly admired. In Don Quixote, the traveler was a knight who protected the innocent. Here, The Boss is a commoner who is opposed to knights. But one adventure is common to both stories: The story of the bewitched pigs is found in both works.
At first, when The Boss meets Sandy (Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise), he is impatient with her, and he is also shocked that she will accompany him on his journey; it does not seem proper or decent for the two of them to travel together—alone. Thus, beginning with their meeting and their subsequent travels, we have a contrast between civilization and primitive innocence. In their first meeting, The Boss is professional, curt, businesslike, and skeptical. He wants written proof of her identity, a map, or directions to the so-called bewitched palace. He even calls her "innocent and idiotic" when she cannot understand why he would want all of the troublesome information that he is asking for, and she is incapable of understanding why he would even doubt her word. Therefore, until they are later married, The Boss continues to be patronizing and prudish; in contrast, Sandy is patient and loving.
In Chapter 12, when the two of them set out on their adventures, the contrast between the city and the lovely countryside is emphasized, especially in the opening paragraph where they "left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest . . ." The quietness and peacefulness is reminiscent of Huck and Jim's trip down the Mississippi when no one is bothering them.
The irony is that in this lovely, peaceful solitude which The Boss so enjoys, he plans to start building huge, smoky factories filled with laboring people who must drudge through life. This is correlated by the fact that The Boss feels trapped in his suit of armor, and yet he would take these free and innocent people and trap them in the huge nineteenth-century factories—a trap much worse than the armor which he is now wearing.
The Boss's meeting with some "freemen" in Chapter 13 prompts some of his views on the Catholic Church and the ruling aristocracy. Here in Camelot, the majority of the people are ruled by only a half dozen people, and these people don't even seem to care because the Church has brainwashed them into believing that they are inferior and that they must be content with their place in life, a place assigned to them, according to the Church, by God Himself. Thus, they remain in servitude because of the alignment of the Church with the aristocracy.
