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jack_reid 's review for:
All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Somehow many consider All the King’s Men the finest book ever written on American politics. Willie Stark, a quiet country-bumpkin, steals the spotlight on his trailblazing political journey. But the narrator Jack Burden is the real focus of Warren’s masterpiece. He is the only character we understand. We perceive all the others through Jack. In the end, we remain perplexed by Stark and must accept we will never understand him. Conversely, we ride along with Jack on his path to self-discovery and eventual acceptance.
Through Jack, Warren explores the burden of the past on the present and future. Without the past, we cannot understand why we are here. What led to this moment? Why not another moment? Some prefer to ignore the past and live in the present, hoping to re-live highs without understanding lows. Jack lives in the present to escape understanding his past, and so avoids planning for the future. He floats through life and accomplishes nothing of substance. He waits for the impersonal tides of time to bury him into the sands of history. Then along comes Willie Stark, a man with no history. Willie manipulates the present to achieve a future only he can see. And he asks Jack to join him as a fixer of sorts.
In Willie’s service, Jack confronts the past and uses it to fulfill Willie’s aspirations. He strains his relationships in the aristocratic Burden’s Landen in service of the truth. But he discovers that the truth is complicated. Can one bad deed offset a life of public service? If two moral codes collide, which wins? The code of the strong, the just, or the powerful? These questions haunt Jack as they’ve haunted philosophers immemorial. He responds by retreating into nihilism, or the “Great Twitch.” But that does not work either. Nihilism is an unsustainable belief. You must build walls of meaning to defend yourself from the indifferent outside of meaninglessness. And Jack finds his meaning with his love discovered in the flower of youth. And in the process accepts his past and finds the means to plan for a future.
Jack’s story resonated with me. But his story is one of many in Warren’s book. Pick it up and see what you enjoy. Warren won one of his three Pulitzer Prize for All the King’s Men. The story, the language, the characters, and the setting all flash in my mind’s eye as I look at my copy. That’s literary fiction at its finest.
Through Jack, Warren explores the burden of the past on the present and future. Without the past, we cannot understand why we are here. What led to this moment? Why not another moment? Some prefer to ignore the past and live in the present, hoping to re-live highs without understanding lows. Jack lives in the present to escape understanding his past, and so avoids planning for the future. He floats through life and accomplishes nothing of substance. He waits for the impersonal tides of time to bury him into the sands of history. Then along comes Willie Stark, a man with no history. Willie manipulates the present to achieve a future only he can see. And he asks Jack to join him as a fixer of sorts.
In Willie’s service, Jack confronts the past and uses it to fulfill Willie’s aspirations. He strains his relationships in the aristocratic Burden’s Landen in service of the truth. But he discovers that the truth is complicated. Can one bad deed offset a life of public service? If two moral codes collide, which wins? The code of the strong, the just, or the powerful? These questions haunt Jack as they’ve haunted philosophers immemorial. He responds by retreating into nihilism, or the “Great Twitch.” But that does not work either. Nihilism is an unsustainable belief. You must build walls of meaning to defend yourself from the indifferent outside of meaninglessness. And Jack finds his meaning with his love discovered in the flower of youth. And in the process accepts his past and finds the means to plan for a future.
Jack’s story resonated with me. But his story is one of many in Warren’s book. Pick it up and see what you enjoy. Warren won one of his three Pulitzer Prize for All the King’s Men. The story, the language, the characters, and the setting all flash in my mind’s eye as I look at my copy. That’s literary fiction at its finest.