All The King's Men Analysis

In my Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition, students are often mandated in reading various novels and classics that reveal inherent human themes such as the Great Gatsby and the Great Expectations. While these mundane and dull novels are dreaded by my classmates and peers, I look forward to reading these novels, captivated by the delicate and entertaining equilibrium of plot and theme. I am often engrossed by these literary masterpieces in their profoundities of morality and society. One of these classic novels that I greatly cherished are All the King’s Men by Robert Warren Penn. When I first begun reading the novel All the King’s Men, I felt betrayed and cheated due to the lack of politics that was replaced by emotion and drama. I erroneously thought that politics should not involve such trivial and irrational matters that clouds

Every politician is drive by their emotions regardless of their insistence on governing on the basis of logic. In the novel, there was no protagonist - almost all the characters demonstrated a level of moral ambiguity. Many had participated in immoral affairs or illegal bribery and yet contributed greatly to their community or revealed genuine human emotion. For instance, the Governor Willie Starks commence his political career as a hard-hitter populist that fought corruption zealously. Despite his untainted and uncorrupted political acclaim, he fell into moral depravity when he was elected Governor by his loyal and unyielding constituents. Governor Starks, or the “Boss”, called by his political minions, began accepting and offering bribes to cover up his sexuality promiscuity and family secrets. As he continued his demise, Governor Starks justified his seemingly immoral actions by insisting that the results were ultimately good. This idea of consequentialism, or the ends justifying the means, becomes a