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

Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings MenIf the hu part race didnt call anything it would be perfectly happy (44). Thus runs one of the early musings of diddly Burden, the protagonist of Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings Men. throughout the story, however, as cakehole gradually opens his eyes to the realities of his own nature and his world, he realizes that the human race can non forget the past and survive. Man must not only remember, but overly embrace the past, because it teaches him the truth about himself and enables him to vitrine the future. As he begins to understand the people in his life and their actions, jackfruit learns that one can rarely make sense of an subject until that event has become a part of the past, to be reconstructed and eventually understood in retention. T.S. Eliot expresses this idea in The Dry Salvages We had the experience but confused the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any mea ning / We can assign to happiness (194). Only by deliberately recalling the past can one understand the metaphysical and weird significance of his experiences. For this reason, Jack cannot make sense of the fateful day of Willie unappeasables murder until long afterwhen I had been able to win the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the name (Warren 407). The pattern of the past reveals the pattern of fallen human nature, thus opening mans 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 happenedfor, to again quote Eliot, What might have been is an abstraction (175). Fantasizing about an abstract, idealized past will never give success i... ...176). History provides a moral and spiritual express 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 lustrous 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 cram him to stand strong in an uncertain future. Works CitedEliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Harcourt raw York, 1963.Warren, Robert Penn. All the Kings Men. New York Grosset, 1946.Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago University of Chicago, 1948.