Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings Men Essays -- Warren All Kings Me

Robert Penn Warrens All the offices MenIf the human race didnt remember anything it would be perfectly happy (44). Thus runs one of the earlier musings of Jack Burden, the protagonist of Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings Men. Throughout the story, however, as Jack gradually opens his eyes to the realities of his own personality and his world, he realizes that the human race cannot forget the past and survive. Man moldiness not only remember, unless also embrace the past, because it teaches him the truth most himself and en competents him to face the future. As he begins to understand the people in his life sentence and their actions, Jack learns that one can rarely make sense of an issue until that event has become a part of the past, to be reconstructed and lastly understood in memory. T.S. Eliot expresses this idea in The Dry Salvages We had the experience exactly missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a diametric form, beyond any meaning / We can assign to happiness (194). solely by deliberately recalling the past can one understand the metaphysical and unearthly significance of his experiences. For this reason, Jack cannot make sense of the fateful solar day of Willie Starks murder until long afterwhen I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the word form (Warren 407). The pattern of the past reveals the pattern of fallen human nature, thus enterprise mans eyes to his own folly and enabling him to capture in wisdom. Man must not only remember his past, but also choose to remember it as it really happenedfor, to again summons Eliot, What might have been is an abstraction (175). Fantasizing about an abstract, idealized past allow never give success i... ...176). History provides a moral and spiritual point of reference for each new epoch. In All the Kings 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 volition raise him to stand strong in an uncertain future. Works CitedEliot, T. S. unruffled Poems 1909-1962. Harcourt New York, 1963.Warren, Robert Penn. All the Kings Men. New York Grosset, 1946.Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago University of Chicago, 1948.