All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren (1946)
“A man who believed in nothing watches a man who believed in everything seize a state by the throat — and discovers that the nothing he believed in was just the truth he refused to look at.”
Character Analysis
Jack Burden is the novel's consciousness — a former history graduate student and journalist who becomes Willie Stark's chief researcher and fixer. He is brilliant, sardonic, and deeply committed to not caring about anything. His philosophy, the Great Twitch, holds that all human action is mechanical and therefore morally meaningless. This philosophy allows him to dig up dirt on enemies, destroy reputations, and deliver devastating truths without accepting responsibility for the consequences. The novel is the story of how that philosophy fails. When his investigation kills his own father and triggers the chain of events that kills his best friend, Jack can no longer maintain that knowledge is neutral and action is mechanical. He must become, belatedly and painfully, a moral agent.
Educated, literary, allusive — quotes philosophy, history, and literature with the ease of someone for whom culture is ambient