Theme Of Responsibility In Robert Penn Warren Rdquo's Men

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“Twitching Sense of Responsibility” Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is not only the story of Willie Stark but also the story of Jack Burden’s life and his understanding of responsibility. As narrator of the novel, the dynamic Jack Burden reflects on his past throughout the book and contemplates his involvement in the pain and suffering of those around him. “It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way” (Warren, 656). Jack Burden once believed that everything around him was beyond his control, the occurrences of a source greater than himself. After a lifetime of seeing people live and die,…show more content…
simply because he could not comprehend the character of Cass Mastern. For Jack Burden, “the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret” (284). Jack Burden could not grasp the truth of accepting the “cold-eyed reproach of the facts” that pointed towards Cass Mastern’s responsibility for the suffering of others (237). To Jack Burden at the time, “one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.” He felt that what had happened to those around Cass Mastern was by no means Cass Mastern’s fault; thus, he could not understand why Cass Mastern had died such a miserable, guilt-ridden death. Jack Burden stopped working on his dissertation and transitioned into the first occurrence of his “Great Sleep”…show more content…
The novel is about a man who influenced the actions of others yet “did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not” (656). There was a time when Jack Burden believed that there was nothing but the Great Twitch, for “it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death” (657). But after many years, he discovered that he did not believe in the Great Twitch anymore. Jack Burden “had seen too many people live and die.” He had seen the Scholarly Attorney, Lucy Stark, Sugar-Boy, Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live “and the way of their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch” (657). Jack Burden had also seen his friend Adam Stanton Die. He had seen his father die as well. He had seen Willie Stark die and with his last breath say, “It might have all been different, Jack you got to believe that” (647). While he once ran from the reality of his responsibility, Jack Burden learned to accept the truth of the influence he had had on

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