All the King's Men

or to accept responsibility for, situations that arise. As each new day and each individual action a person makes creates new situations, responsibility is unavoidable. Interestingly, the way in which people accept responsibility, whether they fearlessly embrace or avoid it, is often a defining mark of their character and is also a profound shaping factor in the ultimate course of their lives. In Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel, All the King’s Men, the central characters of the novel all have to deal with the consequences…

Robert Penn Warren All the Kings' Men portrays the rise of Willie Stark from poverty to governor with the help of his right hand man Jack Burden. For a better analysis on how to do the right thing in politics through Willie Stark, Thomas Aquinas and Niccol'o Machiavelli provide sufficient evidence to support his methods of leadership. When Machiavelli stated, "Ascent to princely power by some criminal or evil conduct; and the rise of a private citizen to supreme authority in his land through…

Part of being a commissioner was that he had to find a purpose and task for every worker in his unit. He would use this position’s power to spread what he believed to be a better ideology on how corrupt monopolies were in the railroad industry, and it wasn’t hard for him to have built relationships with fellow people on the team. Long also held a restorative leadership trait. Restorative is probably his most obvious trait, because his focus was to find what was wrong, and would then think of a…

reach in the state being that they were backed by Standard Oil, and Long openly opposed them and their ways of operating. Huey P. Long proposed that the oil company should be declared a public utility which would give the commission control over the pipelines. He then opposed the railroads, telegraph and even went against the current governor at the time. This all made Long a very unpopular man by the higher up political powers at the time, but he gained support from the people of Louisiana.…

The story of Cass Mastern in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, plays a very interesting role in the novel. At first, it was unclear to me as to why the story was included in the novel—other than serving as the subject matter which Jack was exploring for his Doctoral dissertation. After reading this passage over several times, I realized that Cass’s story was significant because his demeanor—or rather, his shame and guilt—bears a jarring resemblance to Jack’s. Additionally, I was a bit…

person must accept responsibility for decisions that he or she makes. As situations arise that must be dealt with, people have a duty to deal with those situations. In many ways, the act of living itself is an act of ultimate responsibility. In Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel, All the King’s Men, the central characters of the novel all have to deal with the consequences of their actions, although many of the characters try to avoid this solemn duty of life. Through analyzing the actions and…

In All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warrren, while Jack Burden was working for his Ph.D in American History, he comes across a story about a man named Cass Mastern. Although Jack spends countless hours researching about Cass Masterns life, he was never able to finish writing about him since he believed that he could not understand Cass’s life. It was because Jack did not understand how in order to understand the past he must understand the present and how the present can become the past. Jack…

The next rhetorical device used is metaphors, through metaphors in All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren is able to explain his idea that present actions will directly affect the future for good or bad. The first metaphor is, “And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good...”(Warren 333). In this quote, Jack is justifying…

Two very well-known films that deal with politics are “All the King’s Men” and “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.” These movies are culturally significant because they portray American politics in a negative light. They consist of storylines that illustrate the unfavorable side of the nature of our government by making it seem as though there is corruption within it. While both films have been deemed controversial in a sense, it is important to look at the messages they are trying to convey, how…

In much of current day fiction literature, the side perceived as good or just will commonly win in the end. This is an extremely common cliché that plagues much of literature, and is especially especially when the author writes in static scenarios and characters just to progress the plot. In the short story “All the King’s Men” by Kurt Vonnegut there are many instances in which events happen only to progress the plot towards a “happy” ending, such as Pi Ying dying, Colonel Kelly’s son not…