Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

“If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy" (44). Thus runs one of the early musings of Jack Burden, the protagonist of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Throughout the story, however, as Jack gradually opens his eyes to the realities of his own nature and his world, he realizes that the human race cannot forget the past and survive. Man must not only remember, but also embrace the past, because it teaches him the truth about himself and enables him to face the future.

As he begins to understand the people in his life and their actions, Jack learns that one can rarely make sense of an event until that event has become a part of the past, to be reconstructed and eventually understood in memory. T.S. Eliot expresses this idea in “The Dry Salvages”: “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning / We can assign to happiness" (194). Only by deliberately recalling the past can one understand the metaphysical and spiritual significance of his experiences. For this reason, Jack cannot make sense of the fateful day of Willie Stark’s murder until “long after…when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the pattern" (Warren 407). The pattern of the past reveals the pattern of fallen human nature, thus opening man’s eyes to his own folly and enabling him to grow in wisdom.

Man must not only remember his past, but also choose to remember it as it really happened—for, to again quote Eliot, “What might have been is an abstraction" (175). Fantasizing about an abstract, idealized past will never give success i...

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...176). History provides a moral and spiritual point of reference for each new epoch. In All the King’s Men, Jack Burden the historian discovers that the past, honestly considered, does not deceive, nor do its vivid object lessons lead men astray. As Jack replays in his memory the actions of the characters (including himself) in the drama of his life, he grows to understand the roles played by those characters in his spiritual development, and to love them for their true nature. By contemplating the past in this manner, Jack builds out of truth and time a foundation that will raise him to stand strong in an uncertain future.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Harcourt: New York, 1963.

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men. New York: Grosset, 1946.

Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of

Chicago, 1948.