Jack Burden In All The King's Men By Robert Penn Warren

Josh Picker
Mr. Blackstone
AP Lang
10/24/22
Writing In Style In All The King’s Men, a novel by Robert Penn Warren, the main character, Jack Burden, suffers many traumatic events. Jack causes these events himself, either directly or indirectly, yet he continually rejects such a notion. Jack, as an intelligent man, was a history and law student, a reporter, and a political operative who performed a plethora of tasks for southern demagogue Willie Stark. He used his intellect to reject the notion of self-responsibility further, theorizing several ideas of causation that determine reality, like his Great Twitch Theory and its earliest manifestations seen in his Spider Web theories. Similarly, Jack, as a person, is often obsessed with the past.

For example, in the third sentence of the novel, “You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at you and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires…” (Warren 1) is just under two hundred words alone. Warren chooses not to punctuate the sentence, other than its start and finish, because punctuation provides structure and pacing; the lack thereof feeds constant information to the reader, which produces an overwhelming feeling. Similarly, in the same quote, Warren uses a literary technique called polysyndeton to emphasize the “coming at you…coming at you and at you… coming at you…”. By repeating the phrase “coming at you”, Warren attempts to personalize the writing and nurture an even deeper connection between the reader and the characters, so that the reader undergoes the same experiences the characters do, such that the picture being painted by Jack’s memory is vividly recreated in the reader's mind, and the overwhelming repetition of a white street line coming at you is shared with the reader. The lack of punctuation conveys the mounting intensity of Jack’s thoughts and interpretation of the world. Warren also makes Jack run on when he narrates

Jack was so obsessed with the past, to begin with, due to his rough and mysterious childhood, in which he didn’t know who his true father was, why the man he thought was his father left, and his colleagues' and friends’ deaths. Learning the reasoning behind these all provide a form of closure for him. Now satisfied with his past, he resumes his work on the Cass Mastern story, this time writing a book instead of a Ph.D. dissertation, a symbol of his closure as he is finally able to come face to face with history once again. He believes he knows enough of his past to move on, and work toward new things in the future. Similarly, earlier on in the novel, on page 467, Jack’s satisfaction with the requirement of accepting his past to move on is seen when he is speaking about his moments with Anne Stanton, “I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself” (Warren 467.) Jack now believes that if he wants to progress in his life, if he wants to be confident in who he is, he must accept the future through his understanding that “we can keep the past only by having the future…”. Jack Burden is a changed man, who is confident in himself and his