Responsibility In All The King's Men

In the dictionary, the word responsibility is defined as “The state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone” (“English Oxford” 1). From a young age, every 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 inactions of the central characters, many important lessons …show more content…
The antithesis of Jack Burden and his fascination with the past, Tom Stark lives obliviously in the present, actively, and detrimentally tangling himself in the web of life, and ultimately falling prey to the predatory spider of consequence. Throughout the novel, he frequently makes rash and emotionally guided decisions, prescribing to the idea that his youth and local football popularity makes him invincible. To illustrate, Jack describes Tom saying that:
Now Tom wasn’t blundering and groping toward anything, and certainly not towards a discovery of himself. For he knew that he was the damnedest, hottest thing there was...So he didn’t have to bother to keep all the rules…[He] might have managed very well, if [he] hadn’t got into a fight with some yokels who didn’t know or care much about football and who resented having their girls fooled with…the breach of the rules was dumped rather dramatically into the lap of Coach Billie Martin… He suspended Tom Stark…that definitely changed the betting odds for the Georgia game for the following Saturday. (Warren …show more content…
In pursuit of retaining his political power and establishing an everlasting legacy, Willie makes many politically and morally questionable decisions such as blackmailing, threatening, neglecting, misleading, and bribing others. In contrast with Tom, Willie openly acknowledges the possible consequences of his corrupt actions, and in many cases, chooses his actions based on of the severity of the response he believes he can illicit from his target(s). Willie justifies his actions by asserting that “‘there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too… A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind…It all depends on what you do with the dirt’” (Warren 45). Willie compares life and people to dirt, capitalizing on his belief that corruption, sin, and imperfection are interwoven into humanity. Realizing the nature of life, he asserts that the only way to create long-lasting good and useful products is to succumb to the ways of life and mold the dirt, which intimately symbolizes corruption and human error. Willie Stark comprehends that every human being is fallible and recognizes that accepting