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All The King's Men Literary Analysis

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Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men contains a plethora of ubiquitous themes and tropes; it espouses disparate motifs such as corruption, fragmentation, and nihilism. However, the most conspicuous subject that is touched upon is that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The paramount thematic concepts of Christian theology throughout the novel are explicated by use of literary devices such as diction, imagery, and tone; moreover, these convictions are hypostatized through Willie Stark, Jack Burden, and Tiny Duffy.
In the first instance, one can see apposite connections with cut-throat governor Willie Stark and the benevolent Son of God: Jesus Christ. As Mark Mitchell observes, “Willie's meteoric rise to power begins with a tragedy. A school was shoddily built because the corrupt county government gave the job to a corrupt contractor...Some big time operatives see their chance to split their opponent's vote by recruiting this newly redeemed man who some …show more content…

Jack Burden, a narrator with an unprecedented ambition. “Necessity for a character of a higher degree of self-consciousness than my politician, a character to serve as a kind of commentator and raisonneur and chorus,” Interposed Warren on the addition of Burden (Bohner). One can truly appreciate the complexity of Jack’s character as a traipsing—almost omnipotent— narrator in the opulent passages of chapter three: “I felt like God brooding on History,” Burden declares; “...I could see a little chunk of History...there (pg. 215).” By his exploitation of metaphor, Warren shrewdly illustrates how Burden is the mediator between the reader and the fictional world; moreover; the analogy between God and Burden shows the reader’s unattached relation with the novel’s story. Burden’s collation of his situation with that of God’s ‘brooding’ scrutinization of history conjures a range of esoteric and abstruse

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Robert Penn Warren is not a Christian but a seeker (Warren et al. 204). He succumbs to his Christian youth by integrating Christian themes into the political rhetoric in a morally inept society in his fiction. The south in All the King’s Men is corrupt and missing the traditional theme of being motivated by Christianity. There is underlying theme of moral ineptness and this could be a direct representation of the sorrowful regrets of Warren when he reflects on his own young adulthood. Warren’s own daughter reflects on her own experience with his belief: “One of the very first phrases I heard, or remember, was ‘Original Sin.’

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