All the King's Men

A detailed Summary of All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men explores the idea of the relationship between the actions of individuals. Jack Burden does not understand this element, resulting in his escaping responsibility and lacking direction and ambition. Jack, when needing to accept responsibility and face the relationship of actions, runs away through Great Sleeps, living in the past, evading the future, and the Great Twitch theory of human motivation.

There are many things that happen to Jack throughout the novel that provoke a feeling of breaking away from reality and escaping into a world of solitude and sleep. Jack calls these episodes Great Sleeps. Jack presents the Great Sleeps in the order in which he thinks of them. The first Great Sleep, in the novel, occurs after Jack quits the Chronicle. He quits as a result of refusing to take sides in the upcoming gubernatorial campaign. Jack dives into a long-lasting sleep, which arouses a feeling of worthlessness in the things that he believes he wants. He compares these material objects to playing cards within a deck. " Maybe the things you want are like cards" (Warren 99). An individual wants these cards because in a certain circumstance -a card gam

e- they have a purpose. Without a game however, there is no need for these cards. While in a Great Sleep, Jack does not need material things, because there is no life. Like cards, the things you want have to be a part of a great complex to have a purpose. The reader can hypothesize that Jack really does not live while in a Great Sleep. He simply wishes to cease to exist.

Through Great Sleeps, an avoidance of the future, living in the past, and the invention of the Great Twitch theory, Jack runs from responsibility and lacks direction and ambition in his life. During the course of the novel, Jack shows the reader how far he will go to escape responsibility. It's not until Jack sees that life is like a spider web, when he starts to accept responsibility and gain a direction and purpose within life.

It is clear that Jacks avoids the present. Jack tries, throughout the course of the novel, to figure out why Ellis Burden abandons his family. Jack, as he does with Cass, does not see the motivation behind Ellis' desertion. No one gives him any feeling of security when these important events happen in his early years; it is clear that Jack has not accepted them as an adult. As a result of this lack of security, Jack feels lost, with no personal sense of direction or ambition. This is the reason why Jack works for Willie. It is Willie's energy that gives Jack a sense of purpose and direction rather than anything inside himself.

Jack calls himself an idealist early in the novel. He lives by the principle of idealism which he read in a book while in college. Jack describes the principle by saying, "What you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real" (30). This is one of the reasons why Jack formulates the Great Twitch theory. He does not want to admit that his actions are real and that they do affect others. By creating the Great Twitch theory, he refuses to admit the presence of free will. At the end of the novel, Jack starts to take responsibility for his actions. He realizes that by asking Adam to take the hospital job, Willie and Adam both lose their lives. Cass Mastern was right by accepting the idea that life is a spider web, by which one move can trigger

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Approximate Word count = 1494
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English