Jack Burden describes the trip down Highway 58 toward Mason City in the entourage of Governor Willie Stark (whom he often refers to as "The Boss") in summer 1936. In Willie's black Cadillac are Jack, Willie, Sugar-Boy O'Sheean (a short Irish twentysomething who serves as Willie's bodyguard and driver), Tiny Duffy (Willie's Lieutenant-Governor), Willie's wife Lucy Stark (who sits pensively), and Willie's son Tom Stark, whom Jack describes as a young, handsome, flashy football hero. In the second car, which is also full of reporters and photographers whom Willie has brought along, is Sadie Burke, Willie's secretary. The group is headed to visit Willie's father, who still lives out in Mason County, a backwoods area of the state where Willie grew up. Willie intends to use the visit as a photo opportunity with the state media.

The group arrives in the city and enters a local pharmacy, where Willie enters humbly before being recognized and crowded about by the townsfolk. A large portrait of Willie rests in the place. He speaks with an old man at the soda fountain, Malachiah Wynn ("Old Leather-Face"), who explains that his son went to jail for killing someone in a fair fight.

The crowd calls for Willie to make a speech, and he does--though seeming somewhat reluctant--at the top of the County Courthouse. He gives a simple address in a homespun style featuring Biblical quotes, humor, and interaction with hecklers. At the end Willie excuses himself, saying it is his day off, and he makes his way back to the Cadillac.

As the group drives out of the city, Jack reminisces about the first time he met Willie, in June or July of 1922 when Willie was Mason County Treasurer. They met during Prohibition at a speakeasy called Slade's. Also present were Tiny Duffy, who then was a tax assessor and a "city hall slob," and Alex Michel, deputy sheriff. At the time, Jack worked for the Chronicle and was a friend of Tiny Duffy, who had arranged the meeting so Jack could get some information from Michel. Michel arrived with Willie, whom Jack characterizes as a simple man with a deadpan demeanor.

When the two shook hands, Jack thought that Willie winked at him. The scene cuts to sometime far in the future, where Jack asks Willie if he winked at him, and Willie, holding a glass of Scotch, responds coyly, "if I was to tell you, then you wouldn't have anything to think about."

Back at Slade's, Tiny Duffy orders beer all around, but Willie asks for none. Duffy and Alex try to bully Willie into drinking, but Slade steps in and says he will not make drink anyone who does not want to drink. Jack reflects in the narration how Slade, after Prohibition was repealed, was one of the first to get a liquor license, was awarded a prime location for his new business, and obtained remodeling money. On how Slade received all this, Jack writes: "I figure Slade got his reward for being an honest man."

Willie drinks orange pop, and Alex introduces the fact that Willie is in politics. Tiny Duffy is incredulous, and Jack notes how one "could look at Willie and see that he never had been and never would be in politics."

Back in the Cadillac, Willie instructs Jack to find a lawyer for Malachiah Wynn's son. Tiny Duffy objects, saying that the victim was a doctor's son and popular person in the community, and that helping the boy would be bad politically. Willie angrily rebukes him, saying that "his boy is a good boy" and that he instructed Jack to get a soft-spoken lawyer and pay through a friend. Tiny Duffy recoils.

The group arrives at Willie's father's home, where Willie and his wife pose for a deliberate photo with Old Man Stark and his old, infirm dog Buck. Tom and Jack have to physically move the dog and dress him up. More staged photos are taken of Willie upstairs in his old bedroom.

Disgusted with the display, Jack leaves to be alone outside by a fence, watching the sunset. Willie approaches him there and has some of his liquor. Sadie Burke runs over and informs Willie that Judge Irwin has endorsed Callahan, the Senate candidate opposing Masters, the candidate with Willie's support.

After dinner Willie, with the silent disapproval of Lucy and the sad displeasure of Old Man Stark, leaves with Jack and Sugar-Boy. The three drive 260 miles southwest to Burden's Landing, the city where Jack grew up and which bears his name, to visit Judge Irwin. On the way, Jack thinks about his mother and stepfather who live there; his childhood friends Anne and Adam Stanton; and the departure of his father, Ellis Burden, and the ways in which Judge Irwin had been a father figure to him. Jack advises Willie that Judge Irwin will not easily be threatened.

Jack is sent to knock on the Judge's door. The Judge is at first glad to see him, then mortified by the sight of Willie. Inside, Willie asks the Judge if it was fine for Jack to pour him a drink, and the Judge calls Jack a "body servant," causing Willie to laugh. Jack, infuriated, considers walking away from both of them, but he does not.

Stone-cold, Judge Irwin explains that he chose to endorse Callahan since Masters would be manipulated by Willie--and some "dirt" had been brought to his attention. Willie offers to dig up dirt on Callahan, then threatens to dig up dirt on the Judge. The Judge orders them to leave, and on the way out, he trades insults with Jack. Jack is at once enraged and self-conscious about what he says.

On the ride back, the Boss tells Jack to dig up dirt on Irwin, irrespective of the Senate race. In the narration, Jack writes (years after the events here, in the later "present" time of the novel) that Adam Stanton, Judge Irwin, and Willie Stark are all dead.

Analysis

Chapter One sets the necessary groundwork of the novel by introducing the two internally convoluted figures who will drive the action. Please see the Character List for detailed analysis of the lives of the characters.

Willie Stark, "the Boss," is painted as a fiesty, cocksure politician. In Mason City, he is a humble man instantly recognized as a local hero. Outwardly, he appears not to have desired a great deal of attention on his trip; the people apparently cajole him into making a speech. Ultimately, he ascends to the top of the courthouse, as if he were a great orator preparing to make a deep pronouncement. The address that follows is homespun and conversational, laced with Biblical quotations. Ultimately, he deftly wields the attention of the crowd and spins a seemingly impromptu, grandiloquent address in which he champions the cause of the state's rural citizens.

In contrast to his idealistic address and amiable manner, the next scene has Willie rebuke Tiny Duffy, his meek and political underling. A similar contrast occurs at Old Man Stark's house, where Willie, having professed to want only to visit his own father, uses the event as an elaborate photo opportunity, then later cuts it short to attend to a political matter.

At the Judge's house, Willie's deceptively friendly country tone and manner are the same as during his speech earlier. Yet he imposes himself, subtly threatening the political career of the Judge. The heinousness of Willie's slimy politicking oozes from his words against the Judge, who appears to be a kind and ethical old man, even as he uses the same Biblical quotes and Southern colloquialisms:

I said, "But suppose there isn't anything to find?"

And the Boss said, "There is always something."

And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

Two miles more, and he said, "And make it stick."

The narrator, Jack, foreshadows the dramatic conclusion of the novel, even as the events leading up to the deaths of Adam (who is yet to be fully introduced), Willie, and the Judge are far off. Yet the meeting with the Judge, besides painting strong images of Jack and Willie, is what sets into motion the system that will result in these characters' downfalls. The dirt that Jack is ordered to dig up will cause the Judge's suicide, and it will encourage the liaison that results in the mutual deaths of Willie and Adam.

Little Jackie made it stick, all right.

The chapter ends with the line above, as the later Jack looks back on these events. At this time in the novel (mid-1936), Jack, working for Willie and about to perform a task intended to slander and ruin a man he respects, is still unable to see how his influence could result in such tremendous and horrible consequences.

Jack frequently desires simply to walk away from the odiousness of the politics, such as when he leaves the photo shoot to fall into his own thoughts, and when he considers leaving the argument between Willie and the Judge when it veers into personal assaults on him. But Jack, despite having the volition to do so, never truly escapes; instead, he often tunes out by contemplating his own past. Essentially, Jack is not simply trying to escape the present by hiding in the past, but instead trying to figure out the present by sifting through the causes and consequences that have brought him to where he is. Jack expresses interest in arriving at a complete understanding of the shrouded character of Willie Stark; for instance, he later considers the issue of whether or not the Boss winked at him in their very first meeting (but Willie answers, "Boy, if I was to tell you, then you wouldn't have anything to think about," 24).

In the meeting with the Judge, Jack's two worlds collide. His past, where the Judge was a father figure to him after the departure of his "real" father, and where he held a deep respect for the man, now collides with the present, where he works for the Boss, a man he knew when he was truly humble and apolitical, and whose current state disgusts him. Jack has abandoned his open respect for the Judge, who will be revealed as Jack's biological father near the end of the novel, and he passively follows the forceful Willie now.

This inner conflict, where Jack works for a system he despises for no stated reason other than his nihilism, is integral to the novel's plot. Jack is incapable or unwilling to see that by working for Willie, he indirectly (and eventually, directly) is the cause of suffering. His ultimate realization of this fact by the end of the novel is a key closing development to which he alludes at the end of this chapter.

In 1922, as a writer for the Chronicle, Jack is told to go to Mason City and look into Treasurer Willie Stark's crusade against corruption in a county schoolhouse building contract. Jack's editor assumes Willie's wife Lucy, a school teacher, is putting him up to the task.

Jack speaks with old men in town, who claim Willie wants to bring in black workers in supporting a low bid for the contract. At City Hall, Jack speaks with the County Sheriff and County Commissioner Dolph Pillsbury, treating both laconic, backwoods political figures with thick sarcasm. Jack meets with Willie (their second meeting, after the encounter at Slate's), who explains the situation: Pillsbury has a personal interest in ensuring that J.H. Moore, which did not put in the lowest bid, wins the contract. In trying to prevent this, Willie was slandered, with Pillsbury claiming that he supported the lowest bid, Jeffers Construction, which used Negro labor. There were two other bids, however, between the Jeffers and Moore bids.

Willie tries to convince the voters that he is right by using bland speeches and matter-of-fact tracts, yet they are uninterested in his case. Voted out of office, he retires with Lucy to his father's farm, where he diligently studies law.

Fatefully, the schoolhouse built by Moore, using bricks from a relative of Pillsbury, collapses after the brickwork gives way, resulting in three deaths and several injuries. As a result, Willie becomes a popular figure in the backwoods county, and eventually he "found himself running for Governor" (92).

Ex-governor Joe Harrison, whose support comes from the cities in the southern part of the state, essentially decides to put Willie up in order to split the vote with his opponent, incumbent Sam MacMurfee, whose support is from rural areas in the north. Tiny Duffy, an ally of Harrison, is sent to convince Willie to go ahead and manage his campaign.

On the campaign trail with Tiny Duffy and Sadie Burke, another Harrison operative, Willie delivers a series of meticulously written, dull, unmoving speeches. Jack covers much of the campaign, leading to several conversations with Willie in which the candidate bemoans the plight of his populist crusade, as well as a conversation with Sadie about her outfit's ploy. Once Willie realizes his campaign will fail, Sadie reveals the entire setup, gleefully taunting his naivete.

Willie, for the first time in his life, gets drunk the night before a big speech, and Jack administers more alcohol as a hangover cure the next morning to get him to the event, a large backwaters barbeque in Upton. There, Willie stumbles on the stage and, speaking off the cuff, reveals that he and his rural supporters had been duped, to the dismay of Tiny Duffy, who falls off the stage. Willie throws his support to MacMurfee and goes on the stump in his support, delivering a series of popular, fiery speeches in which he paraphrases insults from the politicians who had put him up to the affair: "Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks" (132).

MacMurfee wins the race, and Willie goes back to private practice, retaining his popularity. In 1930, a new, more feisty Willie Stark wins election as governor. He selects Hugh Miller, a distinguished apolitical attorney equally intent on reform, as his attorney general, and he is willing to take Tiny Duffy, whom he mistreats, as well as Sadie Burke into his administration.

In that election, Jack leaves his job as a columnist after being asked to promote MacMurfee more forcefully. After this incident, he experiences a bout of prolonged idleness and sleeping, which he calls the "Great Sleep." Jack notes that this Great Sleep had taken place twice before in his life: after leaving his history PhD dissertation unfinished, and after his marriage to Lois began falling apart.

Unemployed during this period, Jack meets a few times with his childhood friend Adam Stanton, now a famous doctor and medical professor living in a shabby apartment in Burden's Landing. He also dines with Adam's sister Anne Stanton, another childhood friend, to whom is he clearly attracted. Anne shows concern for Jack's drifting in life as well his his hostile relationship with his father, Ellis Burden, who has been working at a mission and passing out Bible tracts.

At the very end of Chapter Two, Jack's Great Sleep is interrupted by Governor Willie Stark, now a more confident and arrogant man, who taps him for a job.

"I mean, what do I do for the job?"

"Hell, I don't know," he said. "Something will turn up."

He was right about that.

Analysis

Chapter Two, a flashback covering Jack's past job as a reporter and the beginning of Willie's political career, charts the trajectory of Willie Stark's rise to power and his rapid evolution from the meek man Jack met at Slade's to the dominating politician showcased in Chapter One. Furthermore, the qualities of Jack Burden are more sharply defined, and more pieces of the past come to the fore.

The part of the chapter dealing with Mason City politics gives insight into Jack's views about other people. He sarcastically dismisses the simplistic politicians with whom he speaks.

They ain't real, I thought as I walked down the hall, nary one. But I knew they were. ... when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. ... Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself. (81-82)

Jack, an educated man, realizes that the petty affairs and corrupt officials in Mason City are irrelevant in the long run. He compares the politicians to the lethargic, idle old men on the bench, whose livelihoods have long since passed. Yet Jack is not "very real" himself insofar as to him, his own life contains a degree of meaninglessness.

Willie is shown as a moral, diligent, and intelligent man in the first part of the chapter. Whereas Dolph Pillsbury simply slanders Willie when accused of corruption, Willie uses a dull, honest plea; consequently, he is rejected by the voters and ignored by the local press.

At the start of Willie's political career, he is a realistic idealist. In his Mason County political fight, he tries to sway voters with dull statistics, hoping that they will find he is an honest man looking out for their best interests. After his landslide defeat, his photo is run in the paper with under the line, "KEEPS HIS FAITH." His idealism is bolstered by the fateful schoolhouse disaster that vindicates him, and he maintains his dull approach when campaigning for governor. Willie's transformation to a slick orator and political manipulator is sparked by the revelation that he has been tricked. After embarrassing Tiny Duffy and gripping the crowd with his fiery, drunken speech at Upton, Willie realizes the sheer power of manipulating the emotions of voters. From this point on, Willie understands the necessity of emotional appeal and wields crass showmanship and underhanded politics like the symbolic meat-axe he mentions in his later speeches. Thus, Cousin Willie becomes "the Boss," Governor Willie Stark.

The relationships among Willie and his underlings are forged in this chapter. Sadie Burke's sexual relationship with Willie takes root here. She helps him in his transformation by ridiculing his idealism and exposing him to the reality of politics. Sadie is used to latching onto strong male political figures, and she becomes inextricably close to Willie from this point forward. Tiny Duffy, who begins the chapter pulling Willie's strings, becomes his pathetic toady on whom the Boss heaps immeasurable abuse.

The relationship between Jack and Willie in this chapter is incredibly complex. At the start, Jack, the narrator, elicits few emotions towards cornpone Cousin Willie. He merely analyzes the stages of Willie's development. That is, he reflects on Willie's innocence, desperation, and naivete when he begins campaigning; he ponders the "luck" that tapped Willie to become a local hero after the schoolhouse collapse; then he watches quietly when Willie, partly through Jack's help, realizes has been duped, and when Sadie tears his ego to shreds. Willie confides his worries in Jack, who is just a reporter, when his campaign goes poorly. Even though Jack says little to boost Willie's ego, Jack, a flat character throughout this chapter, acts as a receptor for Willie's deepest fears and honest feelings while Willie undergoes his change. When Willie becomes governor, he recognizes Jack's honest steadiness and hires him. Jack treats Cousin Willie precisely the same as he treats Governor Stark. Throughout the novel, Willie confides in Jack, who never uses any of Willie's secrets against him, being fully withdrawn from politics. Willie can trust Jack, just as he can trust the loyal yet unintelligent Sugar-Boy; he cannot, however, trust any of his other subordinates, like Tiny Duffy, and he cannot have the same relationship with any of the women with whom he has affairs.

Jack's disinterested nature makes this relationship possible. In his job with the Chronicle, he is dispassionate about politics and willing to write articles slanted towards MacMurfee, whom the paper supports. His employment as a journalist ends when he is unwilling to add any passion to these articles. Jack's job with Willie will play out in the same manner; he is so dispassionate about politics and, indeed, other human beings, that he is willing to dig up dirt on anyone, even his close friends, for Willie to use to blackmail his opponents.

One more key aspect of Jack's character arises in this chapter. Jack is completely unambitious. Those around him, such as Anne, want him to do more with his life. Instead, he slips into long drags of the "Great Sleep," a manifestation of Jack's willful nihilism and powerlessness, if not depression. Jack's attitude contrasts strongly with Willie's extremely energetic idealism. Jack's lack of ambition stems from a variety of visible factors that are exposed in the coming chapters, including his failed love affair with Anne Stanton, his mother's divorce and subsequent frequent remarrying, and the departure of Ellis Burden, whom he believes to be his father, early in his life.

The events of Chapter Three take place sometime in 1933, while Jack is working for Governor Stark.

Jack visits the home of his mother and her husband Theodore Murrell, the "Young Executive," in Burden's Landing. This passage is laced with criticism of his mother's materialism, willingness to replace family heirlooms, and past remarriages to the Tycoon, the Count, and the Young Executive after the departure of his father. He takes a walk in the drizzle to a cove, where he reminisces about a picnic with Adam and Anne Stanton from his childhood, and about arguing with his mother over which college he should attend.

In the present, Jack and his mother attend a dinner party at the house of Judge Irwin. Jack considers Judge Irwin's status as a war hero, his study of Roman history and ancient warfare, and his hobby of making war figurines. At the party, the conservative dinner guests spar with Jack over Willie's socialist reforms. Jack is also cold to an aristocratic girl named Miss Dumonde, who attempts to talk to him. Later, his mother offers to get him a "decent job," and Jack is hostile towards her affection, willingness to provide him with money, and attempts to fix him up with a girl.

On the ride back, Jack thinks about how his presumed father, Ellis Burden, met his mother when she was the daughter of a clerk in a logging town in Arksansas and he was a visiting attorney back in 1896.

At the hotel where Willie and his junket are staying, Jack kisses Sadie Burke on the forehead "just because [her] name is not Dumonde" (181). In Willie's suite, Jack walks in on the Boss fiercely upbraiding Byram B. White, State Auditor, who had been engaged in a corrupt moneymaking scheme discovered by Willie's opposition in the state legislature loyal to former governor Sam MacMurfee. Willie, going after Byram like a schoolchild, forces him to sign an undated letter of resignation for Willie to keep in exchange for his protection against impeachment proceedings taking place against him.

Hugh Miller, Willie's intensely ethical Attorney General, enters after Byram to disagree with Willie's protection. The Boss, still fuming from the argument, complains that his actions, while at times unethical and vaguely unconstitutional, were for the greater good. Miller, in agreement about Willie's goals, nevertheless resigns.

Jack ruminates on Willie's adultery. Not only does Willie keep Sadie Burke as his mistress, but he also sleeps around with other women. Despite not being Willie's wife, Sadie is constantly enraged by Willie's promiscuity, and she considers it a personal affront.

As Jack digs up dirt on MacMurfee legislators, Willie begins delivering lively, fiery speeches throughout the state. Willie intimidates individual legislators using the information. The opposition decides to use Willie's own coercion and corruption against him by initiating impeachment proceedings against him.

On April 4, 1933, Jack visits Mr. Lowdan, leader of the opposition, to coldly inform him that enough legislators have been bribed or bullied into rejecting impeachment. The next day, the impeachment bill is killed. That evening, a massive crowd of rural supporters of Willie descend upon the Capitol lawn, and Governor Stark addresses them victoriously.

After the speech, Willie returns to the mansion to find that his wife has gone to bed. She is angry that Willie has refused to "throw Byram to the wolves" yet is unwilling to leave him, largely for the sake of their son (212). It is revealed that in the following years, after Willie's relection in 1934, she and the governor become privately separated. Nevertheless, the two appear in public for photos at times, largely because Lucy thinks she still has an opportunity to mould her son, whose direction has become increasingly dominated by Willie's wishes. Despite Lucy's wishes, their son Tom Stark becomes a sexually active football quarterback.

Analysis

Chapter Three first delves into the life and backstory of Jack Burden, then provides a clear view of the actions and attitudes of Willie Stark as governor as he deals with a serious threat to his administration.

Jack has a particular relationship with his mother, who is never once named in the book. He describes his affection for her in cold and mechanical terms in the very first paragraph of the chapter: "The eye, very slightly protruding, would be fixed glitteringly on some point beyond me" (153). Jack also criticizes his mother's profligacy and willingness to replace family heirlooms in favor of new furniture. He also looks down on his mother's frequent remarrying, tying that tendency to her symbolic remodeling: "I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were" (160).

Jack ignored his mother's advice when she recommended he go to Harvard and not the State University, and he angrily spurns her for meddling in his life after she tries to fix him up with a girl or uses her connections to procure a job for him. He strives to prove his independence, yet he is still financially dependent on his mother, a fact he does not admit.

Jack has abandoned his past at Burden's Landing, yet he returns to visit his mother and the Judge. Although he looks down on the conservative aristocrats who disagree with Willie's abuse of power, he desires to be respected by them (and by his mother, especially) for his connection to the new administration. Although he does not care about Willie's abuse of power or his reforms, he argues in favor of his boss, almost only because the dinner guests argue against the governor. Finally, Jack desires the approval of his mother though he is dismissive of both her opinions and the entire idea of familial love. In short, to all these people, Jack is stubborn, yet he has no particularly heartfelt opinions. He is simply antagonistic, and ultimately, this dichotomous tension between wanting their adoration and disliking their opinions leaves him empty inside.

Jack's dismissiveness of others is shadowed by his internal feeling that he is defined through those around him. As a person, Jack has no strong measure of himself, so he considers the eyes of his mother and her friends as one metric. This particular thought comes through in the narration:

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. (178)

When Jack returns to the capital, he is thrust into a frantic situation, much in opposition to the calm dinner scene at Burden's Landing. While Jack seems at ease and equally passive in both atmospheres, he kisses Sadie on the forehead and comments that her "name is not Dumonde" (181). Jack feels happier at work, because his work gives him purpose. Additionally, he respects Sadie as a savvy, action-oriented, real woman, as opposed to the vacuous, genteel Dumonde girl who put on an empty facade in Burden's Landing.

In the second part of the chapter, the narrative focus turns to Willie. Willie's forceful fight to stave off impeachment illustrates the sort of politician he has become. Willie's handling of the Byram B. White scandal shows the extent of his newfound domineering attitude. In the last chapter, it was subtly indicated that County Treasurer Willie's disapproval of the corrupt bargain in Mason County stemmed in part from his exclusion from the deal itself. As governor, Willie has become the ringmaster of state government, and he takes pleasure from being in full control over all the deals that transpire in the capital. While agreeing to protect White, Willie treats him like a pet. He forces White to sign an undated letter of resignation; Willie, acting like a feudal lord demanding fealty from a subordinate, now holds White in bondage.

The following scene provides a contrast between Willie and his attorney general, Hugh Miller. Willie Stark is a young, inexperienced politician who tolerates corruption in order to make government run smoothly and meet his noble aims. Willie feels that human beings are inherently corrupt and easily manipulated; he feels that therefore is righteous in playing off these qualities in order to provide for the poor. Hugh Miller is an older, highly distinguished person who is similarly new to politics. Miller shares Willie's desire to help the poor, but unlike Willie, he is completely intolerant of graft. Miller is a moral absolutist, essentially believing that right is right and that one's hands should be completely clean of distinctly illegal activities. But Willie is more of a moral relativist, taking rightness as subjective and perhaps culturally bound, considering that if by tolerating petty corruption he can do more good as governor, then it is necessary to do so. He is thus willing to protect individuals like White. Jack also takes this more practical morality to heart:

"Ought is a funny word," I said. "If you mean, to win, then time will tell. If you mean, to do right, then nobody will ever be able to tell you."

The manner in which Willie successfully staves off impeachment--digging up dirt on rivals, bringing fiery speeches to crowds of poor citizens, and abusing his subordinates while shielding corruption--indicates the success of his underhanded manipulation of the state's political system. By the end of the chapter, Willie is essentially in control of the state. Yet, Willie's moral compass seems irrevocably changed by these events. Hugh Miller, the only truly ethical person in his cabinet, has left him, and his wife has been marginalized as well.

Chapter Four briefly picks up after the end of Chapter One, where Willie has asked Jack to dig up dirt on Judge Irwin. Jack goes into a long flashback of his days as an American history graduate student at the state university. Here, Jack lived as a slob with two others, and the three often went on drinking binges whenever they came into money. His two housemates were graduate students who dreaded the future when they would have to leave the university, spending their time reading, drinking and playing cards together. Jack more often spent his time alone studying the writings of Cass Mastern.

Jack tells the reader the story of Cass Mastern, his great-uncle on whom he tried to write his graduate thesis, having obtained the man's collected writings. This frame story encompasses nearly all of the chapter.

Cass Mastern was born into poverty, yet he was saved by his brother Gilbert Mastern, who had somehow gone west and become a wealthy cotton planter. Gilbert supported Cass financially, sending him to Transylvania College in Lexington in the 1850s on the suggestion of Jefferson Davis, where he studied theology. At college, Cass fell into vice--including one significant sexual impropriety. Through Davis, he became friends with Duncan Trice and his wife Annabelle Trice. Immediately, Cass was stricken by Annabelle, and the two eventually began an affair.

On March 19, 1854, Duncan Trice committed suicide. After the funeral, Phebe, a waiting maid in the house, found Duncan's wedding ring, left on his pillow shortly before his suicide, as a sign that he knew about his wife's affair. Because she could not deal with the fact that Phebe knew about the affair, Annabelle sold her to a merchant who would transport her far away, possibly into prostitution. After being informed, Cass became outraged that their illicit affair had wreaked such awful consequences, including the resulting forced separation of Phebe and a plantation slave to whom she was married.

As Cass wrote in his journal, this event marked a significant turning point in his life and in the way he perceived the world. Leaving Annabelle forever, he went in search of the trader to whom she sold Phebe in the hopes of buying her and setting her free. He ended up at a barracoon where female slaves were being sold into prostitution. When one of the vulgar men there said Cass wanted to buy a yellowish woman, Cass violently struck him--and ended up stabbed with a bowie knife.

Giving up on his quest, Cass returned to manage the plantation his brother Gilbert had paid for. Cass repaid the debt and then, to his brother's dismay, set the slaves free and continued operations on a wage basis for a year until his project's failure.

After considering the sorry future misery of the slaves he had set free, Cass briefly ruminated about the story of Caroline Turner, a wealthy abolitionist from Boston who had never seen blacks before coming to Lexington. She gained notoriety for being abominably cruel to her slaves until a coachman, "mild of manner," killed her during a flogging. Cass wrote that he did not understand why Caroline did this at first, yet he eventually came to realize that it was for the same reason Annabelle Trice sold Phebe:

she could not bear their eyes upon her. I understand, for I can no longer bear their eyes upon me. (253)

Just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Cass and Gilbert found themselves on the same ship as Jefferson Davis, now president of the Confederacy. Cass reflected later that Mr. Davis was "a good man," yet despite the world being full of good men, "the world drives hard into darkness and the blindness of blood" (253).

During the Civil War, Cass, despite being a stalwart abolitionist, enlisted in the Mississippi Rifles for the South, while his brother received a commission as an officer. Although he carried a gun, Cass refused to use it, believing that after the death of his friend Duncan Trice, he had no right to take another man's life. Marching to war, he wore Duncan Trice's wedding ring on a string around his neck. In the first few battles, Duncan went unscathed and was somewhat sorrowfully surprised at his own invulnerability. Eventually, though, he was shot, and he ended up in a hospital in the besieged city of Atlanta, where he wrote his final words and then died. A person at the hospital kept Cass's papers and ring and sent them all to Gilbert. Eventually, the material fell into Jack's possession, and Jack, as narrator, reflects on his consideration of Cass while a graduate student, bringing the story back to the present.

At the end of the chapter, Jack, writing in a later time, explains that his past self could not understand Cass Mastern's motivations. He eventually gave up on the thesis altogether, entering his first period of the Great Sleep, until he left the apartment altogether. The papers of Cass Mastern were collected by the landlady and sent to Jack, and he has had them ever since.

Analysis

Chapter Four marks the pivot point of the novel: everything before it sets the necessary background for the dramatic series of events that unfold in the following five chapters. The tale of Cass Mastern is a frame story within All the King's Men, one that mirrors Jack Burden's own life. It need not be read meticulously, since the particulars of Cass Mastern's life do not have a commanding effect on the novel's main plot. Still, Cass Mastern's tale serves two key purposes in All the King's Men. First, it is a lengthy parallel to the story of Jack and Willie, one that foreshadows the later events of the novel. Second, this story reveals more about Jack's past and mindset and defines the transformation he undergoes in the subsequent chapters.

Cass was horrified when he realized that the affair he conducted with Duncan's wife Annabelle made him personally culpable for his friend's suicide. Motivated by guilt, he devotes himself to righting a secondary consequence of the affair, the destruction of Phebe's marriage. With his powerful, newfound morality, Cass sets off to find Phebe and, essentially, repair the terrible destruction he caused. He renounces slavery and ultimately loses his life. As a young graduate student, Jack Burden is incapable of comprehending this selflessness, just as he is mentally unable to recognize Cass's culpability in the death of Duncan and the sale of Phebe. At this period of his life (which is described in every chapter of the novel but the last), Jack refuses to believe that the events of one's past have any bearing on the events of the present, or that his personal actions have serious consequences for those around him. Cass Mastern's transformation thus foreshadows the transformation Jack undergoes later in the novel when he realizes that his personal actions indirectly brought about Willie's death.

In Chapter Four, Jack narrates the events of his earlier life from the perspective of 1939. He refers to his past self as "Jack Burden," implying a strong difference in his attitudes then and now. He explains that his past self was incapable of completing his thesis on Cass because he was singularly incapable of comprehending Cass's motivations and was emotionally afraid of coming to realize the consequences of actions.

Jack introduces at the end of the chapter the "spider web" theory to define what he eventually realized was Cass's understanding: that "the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle" (260). Jack Burden's slow and deadly course of realizating the veracity of this concept is the primary plot of All the King's Men. It is noted at the beginning of the chapter that the graduate student Jack Burden, a slob who actively irritated his mother and avoided her Southern aristocratic designs on his life, was invulnerable, unlike his two housemates. The present-day Jack calls this invincibility the "curse" of his past self, one that causes a great deal of destruction and which delays his understanding of the spider web for several years (220).

In addition to foreshadowing Jack's eventual redemption, the story of Cass serves to help the reader gauge Jack's progress towards change. Only when Jack realizes the inextricability of his actions from the wellbeing of those around him and begins to conduct himself in an honorable manner does he begin to comprehend Cass's story. Before this realization, Jack simply avoids Cass and falls into another escapist Great Sleep.

Jack notes at the end of the chapter that all his life he has traveled around with the "big squarish parcel with the brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name Mr. Jack Burden fading slowly"--the parcel that contained Cass's papers (261). This fading package symbolizes Jack's fading worldview as he sinks deeper into passive denial and nihilism. (It also represents the common malaise of the graduate student with an unfinished project.) It is one of Jack's many burdens, a parallel to the wedding ring Cass wore around his neck, itself a potent symbol of the destruction his indiscretion once wrought. It is not until the end of the novel, when Jack realizes the consequences of his actions and the motivations of Cass Mastern, that he is able to open his package and resume his thesis.

A few other elements of this chapter are worth noting. Gilbert Mastern, Cass's financially successful brother who attempts to do good by lifting his brother's boat--yet supports slavery--is somewhat representative of Willie Stark, who attempts to do good while using corrupt methods. Additionally, the Cass-Annabelle-Duncan love triangle is a prefiguration of various triangular relationships that twist the plot dramatically later in the novel. The triangle between Willie, Anne Stanton, and Adam Stanton results in destruction on the scale of Gilbert's suicide, as does the adulterous triangle that is revealed to have existed among Juge Irwin, Jack's mother, and Jack's father Ellis Burden.

Additionally, Cass's major interactions with Jefferson Davis, a historical person who seems particularly out of place in an invented allegory within a fictional novel (but whose existence as part of the environment lifts him up in historical memory), hint at the significance of the Mastern story in relation to the tale of Jack and Willie Stark--a representation of the historical Huey P. Long. The story is fictional in many ways, but it is grounded in a recognizable time and place. Much as Jack's fate is strongly linked to Willie's fate, Cass Mastern's life is radically altered by Jefferson Davis's influence. Davis is materially responsible for Cass attending Transylvania, for his meeting the Trices, and for conducting the Civil War, which ultimately takes Cass's life.

Chapter Five now takes up the part of the story where Willie has instructed Jack to dig up dirt on Judge Irwin. The chapter chronicles Jack's location of a long-buried incident from the Judge's past that led to a man's death, "The Case of the Upright Judge."

Jack begins by reasoning that money, leading among the tetrarchy of ambition, love, fear, and money, is likely the cause for Judge to have committed such an indiscretion. Starting his search for leads, he visits his father Ellis Burden, the "Scholarly Attorney" and an old friend of the Judge. The Scholarly Attorney lives above a Mexican restaurant in a decidedly poor, ethnic area of the state capital. The restaurant Jack enters is covered in decorated Biblical signs and scrolls. Downstairs he meets his father, who is surprised to see him, and the Scholarly Attorney retrieves a bag of bread crusts.

Upstairs, the Scholarly Attorney introduces his son to George, a manchild, one of a series of "unfortunates" he has taken in over time. George takes the bread crusts, chews them, then spits them out, moulding the paste into angel sculptures. When asked why George makes angel sculptures, the Scholarly Attorney, with childish interjections by George, explains that he and his wife were circus aerialists. George's wife performed an angel act with white wings and died when the rope broke one day. George, whose act was playing a man who got hanged, became paralyzed and deeply afraid of heights. Additionally, George is only willing to eat chocolate out of the Scholarly Attorney's hand.

When Jack observes his father feeding George in an immensely doting way, he feels a surge of jealousy, disgust--ultimately anger. Jack overcomes these feelings and quickly proceeds to ask his father if Judge Irwin was ever broke. His father refuses to reflect on his past, then criticizes politics as "foulness" after Jack reveals why he is asking. Jack explodes in a tirade at his father, then leaves in a huff, having wheedled out the tacit confession from his father's demeanor that the Judge was indeed broke at some point.

At this point in the narrative, Jack cuts into a brief scene where he attends a football game with Willie, Lucy, Tiny Duffy, and Sadie. Willie's son Tom Stark has become a college football star, and his father is intensely proud. Jack (in the narrative) reacts with cynicism at Tom's popularity and his womanizing, Tiny Duffy's backpatting, and, most of all, Willie's fatherly pride.

Jack cuts back to the case. He meets next with Adam and Anne Stanton for a night in the house of Governor Stanton, where Anne resided in Burden's Landing. At first he is just with Anne, and Jack enjoys the brief intimacy they share in her laughter. Impulsively, as he holds her hand, Jack asks if she knew if the Judge was ever broke. Anne chastises Jack for ruining the moment and for working for Willie. Jack brings up the point that he is building a massive charity hospital. The two bicker, and Anne lets out that she ate lunch with Willie to procure funding for the Children's Home at which she volunteers.

Adam arrives at last, and Jack quickly asks him about Judge Irwin ever being broke. Adam playfully deflects the question, and the three have a wonderful time, as if the argument between Anne and Jack had not happened earlier.

A few days later, Anne calls Jack tauntingly, informing him of her discovery that Judge Irwin had been broke but fixed his situation by marrying a rich woman. Jack considers the first woman the Judge married, who was ill and bedridden for several years while Jack was a young child, then the second woman, Mabel Carruthers, who seemed to have come from a well-off family. Undeterred, he delves deeper into the situation, ultimately traveling to Savannah, where he discovers that Mabel had actually been broke as well when she married the Judge.

Researching further, Jack learns that Judge Irwin, who was Attorney General under Governor Stanton (Anne and Adam's father) at the time of these events in the 1910s, had been given 500 shares of stock in the American Electric Power Company, which he sold to pay off his debts. Later, in 1915, Irwin resigned from his position as Attorney General to work as legal counsel for the company--at six times the pay of his high government position.

Jack considers an incident in which the Judge, as Attorney General, chose not to sue a fuel company for breach of contract for $150,000 in back royalties. When Jack goes to sleep, the name Mortimer L. Littlepaugh comes to him, and the next morning he recalls from somewhere in his memory the headline Mortimer L. Littlepaugh's Death Accident, Coroner's Jury Decides and the phrase Counsel for the American Electric Power Company. Jack tracks down Mortimer's sister, Lily Mae Littlepaugh, who was then working in a Memphis slum as a medium. Through guile and bribery, Jack forces Lily Mae to break down and admit that Mortimer killed himself after being fired when his bosses chose to bribe Irwin and make him vice-president rather than keep his services. Both Mortimer and his sister went to Governor Stanton to protest, but they were dismissed, implicitly because the governor chose to protect his friend, Judge Irwin.

This concludes Jack's extensive research. He thus implicates both Judge Irwin and Governor Stanton in bribery, corruption, and conspiracy to conceal these events, all of which resulted in the death of an honest man.

Analysis

The first four chapters of All the King's Men set the necessary characterization and groundwork that enable the plot to move in the final five chapters. In Chapter Five, the novel turns from exposition and backstory to a rapid movement of plot. The discovery about Judge Irwin and Governor Stanton by Jack in Chapter Five sets off the dramatic events of the rest of the novel. For instance, Anne Stanton and Adam Stanton are driven closer to Willie Stark after hearing of their celebrated father's corruption, and Judge Irwin commits suicide. These consequences touch off subsequent events that rattle Jack's life. This is the spider web effects rippling through the characters' lives.

Jack's emotional interaction with his father Ellis in the beginning of the chapter explains part of his character. He is intensely jealous at the simpleton for whom his father cares, and he nearly cries at the sight of his father feeding George a piece of chocolate with his hand. Despite that one human moment, throughout the rest of the scene and the narration in this chapter, Jack is combative, ironic, and cynical. Thus it is implied that his father's abandonment has fostered his cynicism. His father's bizarre religious views, one could say, have pushed Jack towards nihilism and dissolution.

Two short scenes involving Willie and his retinue take place in this chapter. Jack's feelings about fatherhood come out in the football scene, where he bitterly reacts to Willie's pride in his son Tom. The scene's description is also intensely cold, in contrast with the roaring pride Willie expresses. Willie is proud of Tom, who has grown to become a football star; Tiny Duffy remains sycophantic; Sadie Burke remains dryly cynical; and Lucy grows more distant from her son and nominal husband. She is marginalized from the decision of whether or not Tom should play football for fear of injury; Willie has brushed away her concerns and pushes his son hard. A later scene briefly shows Tiny Duffy discussing his plan to neutralize Willie's primary opponent, Sam MacMurfee, by slipping the hospital contract to his close associate, contractor Gummy Larson.

As narrator, Jack cuts into these scenes abruptly, introducing the topic to which he turns with the words "Which was:" (279). This shift highlights the fact that Chapter Five is setting the groundwork for the dramatic events that follow: Tom is now a football star, and he will later suffer an injury that radically changes Willie's decision on the hospital contract. Meanwhile, Tiny Duffy's plan will factor into the series of events that result in Willie's death.

Jack's gathering with Anne and Adam sheds light on all three characters. Jack poetically describes Anne, further implying his deep love for her. The two get into an argument when Jack tries to get information about Irwin--but she too might compromise her principles for a greater good on occasion. Jack, while defending his boss, is taken aback when Anne reveals that she has had lunch with Willie to discuss charity funding. He immediately switches his allegiance in the argument and insults Anne for dealing with the governor. The implication of this scene is that Jack is being emotionally driven by his affection for Anne, which translates into deep jealousy. Jack brings up Willie's hospital in the argument to defend the Boss, yet when Willie described his plan in Chapter Three, Jack was unenthused. The entire emotional situation among Jack, Anne, and Willie is not fully revealed here, but in subsequent chapters, Jack will learn that Anne and Willie have been engaged in an affair, and Jack will reveal to the reader his past relationship with Anne.

At the end of the scene, Jack tries to figure out why the three were so happy that night. "Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy?" (292). Jack is unable to comprehend or deal with his own feelings, so he quickly gives up trying to do so: "To hell with it, I thought, listening to the leaves" (292). He falls right back into his work, indicating that he engages in historical research as a form of evasion of his own emotional troubles.

As we learned in Chapter Four, Jack is an intense historical researcher, one who is eminently skilled and fit for his work with Willie. Yet, the key irony of All the King's Men is that despite his prowess and luck at research, Jack is unable to comprehend or deal with much of what he finds (e.g., Cass Mastern's motivations). He works in a cold, machinelike manner without regard for those he abuses emotionally in order to uncover the past (e.g., his father and Lily Mae Littlepaugh). Furthermore, Jack seems to completely avoid the quandary of what would happen to his childhood father-figure Judge Irwin once the dirt is reported back to Willie. As his harsh interrogation of Lily Mae shows, Jack coaxes the truth out of the past not out of any sense of justice or righteousness; instead, he does so solely because of Willie Stark's direction.

An even greater irony of All the King's Men is that Jack is a historical researcher who "cannot or will not make sense out of his own past" (Woodell, 62). Jack searches history with great success, yet he proves incapable of retrieving a greater personal understanding from his own past. This is the meaning of Chapter Five's final, haunting lines:

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe.

And we love truth. (313)

Jack reviews some of the events that took place during the seven or so months he was researching the Judge's life, up to March 1937. Tom Stark was involved in an auto accident while driving drunk, and his female passenger was badly wounded. Willie and Lucy argued in the hospital, with Lucy claiming that Willie's permissiveness would ruin their son.

In this period, Willie's goal of building a six-million-dollar free hospital intensified, and Tiny Duffy persistently tried to sell him the idea of giving the contract to Gummy Larson, an ally of MacMurfee who would be converted to the governor's side and provide a kickback for Duffy. In a heated meeting Willie, drunk, tells Jack that his hospital will be his legacy, and that he will build it without letting "those bastards muck with it" (321). Willie requests that Jack get Dr. Adam Stanton, childhood friend and world-renowned physician, to run it.

Jack goes to Adam's cluttered apartment and pitches Willie's request. Adam, who is referred to as the "Friend of Your Youth," refuses, implicitly because he dislikes Willie's corrupt methods (322). Jack charges that Adam wants to "do good," and that Willie's hospital will help a lot of people even if it might be born out of corruption (326).

These events are revealed to have taken place just prior to Jack's meeting with Miss Littlepaugh at the end of Chapter Five. When Jack returns with the evidence of Judge Irwin and Governor Stanton's corruption, Anne Stanton calls him and asks to meet at Slade's place in the state capital. That night, Anne pleads with Jack to get Adam to take the position at Willie's hospital. Adam told her that he could not because of his pride and refusal to "touch filth" (339). He accuses her of selling her own pride by working with the governor to solicit funds for her Children's Home.

In response to Anne's desperation, Jack tells her about the dirt he uncovered about their father and the Judge as a way to convince Adam, whose morality, he reasons, comes from the morality of his forebears. Anne, however, reacts hysterically to the revelations, running down a pier. A cop approaches them and threatens to arrest them, but Jack uses his position as a close associate of the governor to bully the cop. Anne is offended by this event.

A few days later, Anne calls with a cooler head to request the evidence. After showing the letter and the deposition to Adam, she returns to Jack dejected, to say that he will run the hospital. She then asks Jack to show the papers to Judge Irwin before he ever uses them, and he agrees.

Later Jack, Sugar-Boy, and Willie visit Adam's apartment to formalize the arrangement. The meeting between the polar characters of Governor Willie Stark and Dr. Adam Stanton is awkward. Adam makes explicit his criticisms of Willie's administration. Willie likens Adam to resigned Attorney-General Hugh Miller, saying both of them desire to make good in the world, yet neither realizes that it has to be made "out of badness," as Willie believes (353). When Adam presses Willie about how he distinguishes good and bad, Willie simply says that he and everyone else make it up as they go along.

On the way home, Jack wonders why Willie was so mad that "Tiny's brand of Bad might get mixed in the raw materials from which he was going to make some Good" in light of what the Boss said to Adam (358). Jack thinks back to watching with Anne the fiery, populist speech Willie made after beating impeachment. After the address, Jack asked Willie if he meant it when he said, "Your need is my justice" (360). Willie answered:

"God damn it," he exclaimed, violently, still staring at me, "God damn it--" he clenched his right fist and struck himself twice on the chest--"God damn it, there's something inside you--there's something inside you--" (361)

While thinking about inconsistencies in the Boss's rhetoric, Jack begins wondering how Anne knew about the Boss's offer of the hospital directorship to Adam. In May, Jack finds out from an incensed Sadie Burke that Anne Stanton was having an affair with Willie. Dazed, Jack walks to Anne's home and looks in her face. She nods in affirmation.

Analysis

In Chapter Six, three characters are mentally ruined by Jack's actions. Adam and Anne lose their idealism because of Jack's discovery, and Anne's subsequent relationship with Willie Stark, which is enabled by the discovery, crushes Jack's spirit. Sadly, "Jack's search for the truth, which he thought could not harm anyone, has just destroyed the cherished ideal of his best friend" (Woodell, 78).

The revelation that Governor Stanton defended Judge Irwin's corruption ruins the characters of Adam and Anne. Adam and Anne were driven to do good deeds their entire lives because of their upbringing in a wealthy Southern family concerned with notions of honor and complete morality. They had a deep respect for their father, whom they had perceived as faultless. The proof that he committed such an impropriety causes them to lose their faith in their heritage and essentially concede defeat to Willie Stark's brand of moral ambiguity. Adam, once was convinced that he could do good without getitng involved with such a corrupt figure as Willie, has been broken in agreeing to take the position. And Anne, an aristocratic girl with a respect for power and direction and who was turned off by Willie's methods, at last surrenders herself to Willie.

The theme of the "New South" versus the "Old South" comes into focus in this chapter. Willie Stark represents the morally ambiguous "New South": he is a young, brash demogogue willing to use corrupt and amoral tactics in order to help out his impoverished countrymen. Adam and Anne Stanton represent the good parts of the dying "Old South": they are staid aristocrats who intend to do good while completely rejecting Willie's disgusting tactics. When Adam and Anne lose their ideals because of the death of their father's image, though, the New South achieves a great victory against the Old South, and the novel's characters slouch further down the path to moral dissolution.

Jack and Adam are vitally contrasted in their arguments over Willie's hospital. At the heart of the argument, Jack is irritated by Adam's idealism and refusal to work with the corrupt Governor Stark. As a cold realist with ambiguous morals, he finds ridiculous Adam's refusal to do an immense amount of good for the poor in his state. Adam, meanwhile, espouses staunch, Calvinistic morals and a sense of honor. In short, Adam still believes in the ideals of the Old South and the basic goodness of people; Jack does not.

Another key difference between Adam and Jack lies in their motivations. Both come from aristocratic backgrounds, yet neither is a materialist, and neither is susceptible to flattery. Adam is non-materialistic because of his devotion to his life's work of helping people; Jack is so because of his aversion to his aristocratic, vain mother. Furthermore, Jack tells Adam he cannot be flattered because he is a "truly proud man" who knows "his own worth" and "could never commit the sin of envy" (325). Jack is simply inoculated from flattery because of his cold cynicism. Additionally, while Adam is proud, Jack is eminently self-conscious. He lacks confidence, which is indicated by his emotional overanalysis of Adam's smile--and his indignity when Adam calls him irrelevant. Jack calls Adam the "Friend of My Youth" in this chapter, largely because of his private worry about the state of their long friendship.

Moreover, the chosen professions of Jack and Adam symbolically highlight the differences between the two. Jack perfectly defines such differences when discussing the issue with Anne:

Yes, I am a student of history, don't you remember? And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost. But Adam, he is a scientist, and everything is tidy for him, and one molecule of oxygen always behaves the same way when it gets around two molecules of hydrogen, and a thing is always what it is, and so Adam the romantic makes a picture of the world in his head, it is just like the picture of the world Adam the scientist works with, all tidy ... The molecules of good always behave the same way. The molecules of bad always behave the same way. (341)

Along with his contrast with Adam, Jack reveals more of his character through his relationship with Willie. Jack is not one of Willie's mistresses or sycophants; he snaps to the Boss, "I'm not any of your scum, and I'm still grinning when I please" (321). Jack cannot be bought (like Tiny Duffy), seduced (like Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton), or threatened and smeared (like Adam Stanton and Judge Irwin) by the Boss, meaning he is the only human being in the narrative who is immune to Willie's tactics.

Still, Jack is not invincible. As readers realize by this chapter, his cynicism and self-sufficiency are a front masking his emotional confusion and pain. Jack's immunity to the Boss only sets him up for an even greater downfall that comes as a consequence of his harmful actions. Jack's discovery about Judge Irwin's life comes back to haunt him when the evidence impels Anne to enter into a relationship with Willie. Jack loves Anne precisely because she represents the pure ideals of the Old South, ideals that Jack, in his self-consciously cynical state, is afraid to sully. "Jack's southern belle has tumbled from her pedestal" (Woodell, 81).

Jack Burden is a cold realist, one who is emotionally and philosophically empty. He works for Willie Stark with no regard for either the Boss's systemic abuses or an intense drive to help humanity. He lashes out at the idealistic attitudes of the two men closest to him, Adam and Willie. In the argument between pragmatism and moral absolutism, Jack takes the former position, but only because pragmatism suits his nihilistic attitudes. Jack's realism bears little resemblance to the charity-driven realism of Willie Stark. In this chapter, these three characters become further tangled in the "spider web" that binds them together. Jack personally has yet to discover that his actions have deep, painful consequences for others and for himself. In the next chapter, he will depart the state, and a long, introspective revelation of his past with the "high-toned" Anne Stanton is to come.

Chapter Seven delves back into Jack Burden's past by telling the story of his failed relationship with Anne Stanton and his failed marriage to Lois Seager. The chapter begins with Jack's impulsive trip west to Long Beach, California, after receiving the news of Anne's affair with Governor Stark.

Jack spends 36 hours in a hotel in Long Beach, then heads back in a car trip that takes 78 hours. In the narration, Jack's mind wanders through events of his childhood. He zeroes in on a summer when at age 21, he was home on a break from college and Anne, at 17, was on vacation from finishing school. He spent much of his time with Adam and Anne, swimming, picnicking, and playing tennis. One night, Jack and Anne were reclining in a car together after a movie, watching the sky. Jack considered reaching over and making a move on her, but he did not. Later, when he was alone, he thought about how Anne sitting back in the car with her eyes closed resembled how she looked leaning back in the ocean before a storm when they were out at the beach years back. Jack realized then that he was in love with Anne.

The next day, Jack and Anne went on a walk together, during which he kissed her and told her he was in love. Anne was taken by surprise, and when they returned, she went upstairs to be alone. Jack considered that she went to her room to consider her new self and her supposed love for him.

Jack and Anne playfully spent the rest of the summer together in a youthful love affair. Towards the end of the summer, Anne asked Jack what he would do with his life. He was unambitious, but he said he would support her. And she told him that she did not care what he earned, so long as he did something he wanted and would not end up as someone working in a job just for money. The next day she told him that she really meant what she had said.

Late in the summer, Jack did not see Anne for two days. When she returned, he seriously demanded to know if she loved him, and she told him yes.

At the very end of the vacation, Jack and Anne were in his mother's home alone when they tacitly felt it was time for the two to consummate their relationship. After they undressed in Jack's bedroom, he hesitated and told her it was not right. Jack's mother returned unexpectedly then, and the two rushed to get dressed. The next day, before Anne was to return to finishing school, she assured him that they would get married.

That Christmas, the two met again, but they did not have sex, and Anne said she would not marry him just then. The two fought about it then, and they fought again when they saw each other briefly during the next summer, when Jack had gotten his B.A. and was dithering about attending law school (as Anne now wanted him to do). Anne left to attend to her sick father at a hospital in Maine, and during this time she kissed another boy. Later in the summer, before Anne left to attend college, although the two spent time together and "made all the motions" they had made before, Jack felt "it was not the way it had been" (411).

The next Christmas, after Jack had gone off to law school, the two were home again, and Jack pressured Anne to marry him right then. Jack assumed the problem was money, so he said he would get a job through a family friend he detested--but Anne again said that she wanted him to do what he desired. Later, Jack was kicked out of law school, and he ended up in a scandal that involved two girls while celebrating. Quietly, without seeing each other, Anne and Jack went their separate ways.

Jack took his job at the Chronicle then, but then he left to embark on his Ph.D. (as described in part in Chapter 4). After failing to complete that work, he returned to his newspaper job and married a woman named Lois. She married him in part for his family name; he married her because the two were "perfectly adjusted sexually" (416).

Jack's marriage withered when he began to feel suffocated by the vacuousness of Lois and her friends, and when Lois began to grow irritated by Jack's lack of grooming. The two started fighting frequently, their marriage only being held together by their perfect sexual adjustment. At last, Jack fell into his second Great Sleep. Then, finally, he packed his suitcase and walked out on Lois forever.

Anne, meanwhile, left college after two years, then lived alone in a small apartment in the city, mostly spending her time reading and volunteering at a children's home. She was engaged to a lawyer briefly, but nothing came of it. At 35, unmarried, she and Willie began their affair.

Jack, narrating his thoughts following the trip to California, writes of his realization that Anne understood his lack of self-confidence and unconcern for the future. Jack at last realizes that the affair between Anne and the Boss is the consequence of his actions--two important causes were his lack of confidence and the revelation about her father that he dug up.

Jack, in California, discovers a dream that all life is "the twitch of the blood" and that all humans act on random passions (427). Thus, Jack believes he is not responsible for anything. He derives willpower from this idea:

First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.

If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. (427)

Analysis

Much like Chapters Two and Four, Chapter Seven is another flashback. Here, the portions of the history and motivations of Jack Burden that had been just hinted up to this point in the novel are revealed through the descriptions of the two primary romantic relationships in Jack's life. The reader discovers exactly what the nature of Jack's and Anne's relationship was, and the story behind Jack's passive-aggressive cynicism is divulged.

Jack's passiveness and tendency to run away from his problems are the central character traits that fully form in this chapter. First, Jack's passionate affair with Anne ends due to his own indecisiveness. Anne, even as a young girl, realizes the immaturity and fear in Jack's indecisiveness; although she has no doubts that Jack would provide for her, the fact that he cannot do what he loves in life is unacceptable and unattractive to her, a girl who had been raised by an upright and prestigious father. Later, Jack could not have sex with Anne because he feared that doing so would rob him of some aspect of his past, particularly the image he has of Anne floating on her back in the ocean. He gets himself kicked out of law school rather than finding a decisive solution to his problems.

Jack's marriage to Lois fares poorly due to his low self-esteem, which is partially catalyzed by his break-up with Anne. Lois truly loves Jack, yet he only treats her as a sex object. He treats her with terrible disregard, then falls into another passive Great Sleep, and he ultimately walks out the door: "Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you" (422). This line ironically plays on Jack's past inability to take responsibility for what was largely his fault.

I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as something precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. (426)

Jack's departure to the West is his physical escape from his problems, an extension of his continuing inability to deal with notions of ethical responsibility and the consequences of one's actions. Jack's lifelong lack of ambition was a result of his fear of the future; he goes so far as to begin the study of history because of this very fear, as a mechanism with which to flee the present and the burden of responsibility (411). He fails to recognize that inaction is still action and that the lack of any intentions can still cause disaster. Anne's attraction to Jack burned out precisely because of Jack's lack of ambition. And Jack's research into the past for Willie's sake ended up ruining Anne's ideals and bringing her together with Willie.

Jack comes to a false realization at the end of this chapter, not the true epiphany he experiences in Chapter Ten. After fleeing to the West, Jack recalls a dream at the end of the chapter that all people are controlled by a random, inscrutable "twitch of the nerve" (427). This comforts him, since it becomes yet another excuse to avoid responsibility for his actions and the actions of others. Jack is thus able to avoid realizing that Anne loves Willie because of Willie's social place and Willie's ambition. Jack Burden's self-delusion accomplishes a transformation into even more of an unambitious, bitter person, one who waits idly as three people he loves die as a result of the things he has done. The "very great truths" he learns represent this delusion:

First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.

If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. (427)

Jack believes that he never had any potential in life or with Anne, and that he is not responsible for any indirect consequences of his actions. And he is able to cling to these falsehoods only by forcing himself to believe his solitary dream.

Jack drives back from California, now empowered and shielded by his newfound unconcern for the actions of others and himself. On the way back, he picks up an old hitchhiker with a strange facial twitch, which occurs independently of everything else on the hitchhiker's visage. From this phenomenon, Jack extrapolates the theory of the Great Twitch: that all human actions are random phenomena, so again no one bears any responsibility for his or her misdeeds.

Jack returns to Willie's office. He is now totally shielded from rage and other people. In this period, Jack sees Adam a few times, and he has the opportunity to witness a graphic lobectomy.

That summer, Adam was propositioned by Hubert Coffee, an agent of contractor Gummy Larson, to influence Willie to award the medical center contract to Larson. Adam punches him, then writes a letter of resignation, which he does not mail that evening. Anne, who was in Adam's apartment at the time, contacts Jack, and the two meet in a pharmacy. She begs him to get Adam not to resign, and Jack hatches a plan to get Willie to file bribery charges against Coffee, to show Adam that Willie was on the side of good. The problem in his plan is that if the case were to go to trial, Anne might be called to the stand, and her relationship might be forced out in the open. In this conversation, Anne tells Jack that Willie is planning to run for the Senate next year and that Jack does not know Willie as well as he thinks he does. The next day, Jack gets Willie to agree to the plan, and he smooth-talks Adam into first agreeing to press charges and retaining his position at the medical center, then deciding to drop the idea of charges since they would affect Anne.

Later that summer, Willie's son Tom Stark is accused of being the father of the unborn child of Sibyl Frey. Marvin Frey, her father, launches the accusation to Willie, and Tom is dragged in to face his father. Tom claims that any number of men could be the child of Sibyl, a fact that enrages Willie.

Sam MacMurfee, Willie's chief political rival, hears of the situation, and it is revealed that he even knows Marvin Frey, who lived in MacMurfee's district. MacMurfee is willing to talk with Marvin, who is demanding that Tom marry his daughter, into dropping this demand in exchange for money for Sibyl and also for Willie's agreement not to stand in the way of MacMurfee's run for Senator. While Willie thinks about the deal, Jack visits Lucy Stark, who wants to know the truth about her son. Jack feels that he owes Lucy a penance. She expresses her desire for Tom to marry the girl and is shocked to find out that any number of men could be the father and that politics and blackmail have been injected into the situation. Lucy says she loves her family and has tried to do right, and then, resigned, she says she has to think "it will be all right in the end" (461). She says she would love unconditionally the innocent baby who could be her grandchild.

Willie develops two ideas for dealing with the problem. His first idea, getting in touch with Marvin Frey and negotiating with him personally (rather than through MacMurfee), proves impossible, since MacMurfee has sequestered Marvin and Sibyl in Arkansas. Willie's second idea is to have Judge Irwin, a MacMurfee supporter, persuade him to drop his extortion. Willie asks for the dirt Jack has dug up on the Judge, but Jack will not give the information if Irwin could prove it is not true.

Jack goes to Burden's Landing where, the next morning, he reads a paper on the beach. He sees a young woman and a young man play tennis, and he compares them mentally to Anne and himself. Jaded, he imagines telling them that their lives will not be blissful and leisurely forever.

Against his mother's wishes, Jack barges into the Judge's house. The Judge is hospitable and glad to see him, but Jack is cold. They both remember the last time they saw each other, the night Jack came with Willie and Sugar-Boy. Jack immediately tells Irwin about MacMurfee's blackmail, then pleads with him to convince MacMurfee not to go through with it. Despite his support of MacMurfee solely due to Willie's heavyhanded methods, the Judge says the matter is "MacMurfee's affair" and refuses to do anything about it. Jack, frustrated with the Judge's obstinance, drops the name Mortimer L. Littlepaugh, which the Judge does not immediately remember. Jack hands the Judge the manila envelope containing the evidence, and Irwin immediately becomes withdrawn. Jack threatens to destroy the Judge's public reputation, then accuses him of trying to protect a blackmailer (MacMurfee). Momentarily, Jack fears the Judge might attack him, but instead the Judge smiles and cheerfully tells Jack that he has a way out. Jack, confused, tells the Judge he will be back the next day for his decision.

That night, Jack is roused by the loud scream of his mother, who accuses him of killing his real father, Judge Irwin, with whom she was in love. Jack calls a doctor, who sends for a nurse and instructs Jack not to let anyone (such as the Young Executive, Jack's stepfather) to see her until she is normal. The doctor then tells Jack that the Judge committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart, and that he believes the reason was because of the inability of such an active man to deal with age and limited activity.

Thereafter, Jack's true relationship with Judge Irwin is revealed. While Judge Irwin had been stuck married to an invalid whom he was obligated not to divorce, he carried on an affair with Jack's mother. He then told Jack's assumed father, the Scholarly Attorney, that he was in love with the man's wife, causing the Scholarly Attorney to walk out of his house and spend his life as a religious fanatic. After the Judge's invalid wife died, he and Jack's mother did not marry for a reason Jack never knows.

Two days later, the Judge is buried. Jack tries in vain to figure out who was truly or most responsible for the Judge's death. Was it Jack, Mortimer Littlepaugh, or the Judge himself? He reasons that the suicide was the consequence of the Judge's "protracted and ineluctable self-destruction." The next day, Jack is told he is the recipient of the Judge's entire estate.

Analysis

If All the King's Men is the chronicle of Jack's progress towards realizing that his actions have serious consequences and accepting the morality of having to take responsibility for what he does, then Chapter Eight is his nadir. He enters the scene "refreshed" by his trip west, where he came to conclusions that simply reinforced the idea that he is not responsible for the indirect consequences of his actions. This idea is represented by his theory of the Great Twitch, which Jack invents to absolve himself of all worldly responsibility. He is more emotionless than before in this chapter, especially through his cold interactions with Willie and Anne--in sharp contrast with Jack's love for Anne in the previous chapter. Jack's rejection of responsibility has led him to adopt a seriously nihilistic viewpoint. He is ruthless to Judge Irwin, the avuncular man who once cared for him, when he brings his evidence of the Judge's bribe. As a fitting symbol of his new impersonal attitude, he witnesses a man get lobotomized in a procedure that is thought to erase one's personality.

Still, the dramatic end of chapter eight brings hope for Jack's impending redemption. Jack is forced to deal with the fact that something he did seems to have caused the death of his father. Jack forces himself to conclude that the Judge brought his death upon himself:

For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal's own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.

Jack is relieved that his father is not the weak Ellis Burden but the strong (yet flawed) Judge Irwin. Judge Irwin's willingness to stand by his priniciples and take responsibility for his past actions through killing himself in the face of Willie's blackmail (even if the suicide is unwarranted) is precisely the sort of courage that Jack lacks; now, Jack has an example of moral uprightness to follow.

He has also begun to feel a deep sympathy for his parents. He is now beginning to respect his mother, whom he respects for her capacity to love. As for his supposed father, Jack now understands his actions and pities his fate. Jack considers the irony that his supposed father, Ellis Burden, was a good man who was cuckolded by his best friend and driven out of his home; and that his real father, Judge Irwin, was an adulterer who drove a man to suicide: "I had swapped the good, weak father for the evil, strong one" (486). Essentially, this is an allegory for Jack's (and Willie's, as well) ideological choices. He has traded humble morality for power through a cynical lack of ethical concern. The good news is that he is now beginning to realize and lament it. Jack has lionized the dramatic Judge Irwin, implying that his own full redemption will not come peacefully.

The fact that the Judge's suicide eats it away at Jack's conscience prefigures the dramatic events of the next chapter. The double meaning of Chapter Eight's final sentence essentially foreshadows what is to come:

It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter. And the winter had been long.

After reaching its coldest point, the ice of Jack's emotionlessness and carelessness has begun to break.

Jack returns to work, and Willie is insensitively outraged that the Judge has killed himself to escape the Boss's blackmail. Jack refuses to continue blackmailing people for Willie, but he remains a part of Willie's operation.

Willie decides to stop MacMurfee by buying off his main backer, contractor Gummy Larson--by giving him the contract for Willie's medical center. In a meeting between Willie and Gummy, Willie castigates Tiny Duffy, who had recommended and desired giving Larson the contract as a way of neutralizing MacMurfee from the start, and who stands to make a substantial kickback from the affair. He also blasts Larson, who is in the process of selling out his friend. The two take the Boss's drunken raving in silence. The Boss accidentally splashes Duffy's face with alcohol and breaks a glass on the floor. The Boss tells Larson the deal is arranged, and Larson and Duffy depart. Jack and Willie talk briefly before Willie passes out. Willie says he wants the hospital built perfectly, and he does not blame his son for the situation he was in. Jack leaves Willie in the care of Sugar-Boy.

One Saturday night, Tom and two other members of the team get into a fight at a roadhouse, and the coach, pressed by the publicity the event receives, suspends Tom. The team loses the next game, and Willie pressures the coach into letting Tom play again. Two games later, Tom is tackled and does not immediately get up. The Boss is unconcerned, thinking his son will be back on his feet presently, so he focuses on the game instead. Near the end of the game, Willie is called to the field house to see his son, and he tells Jack to go back to the office and wait for him there. Jack goes back, finds the place completely empty, then sets to work on tax figures in his office. He hears Sadie Burke crying. She is displeased to see Jack, and she says she plans on leaving town for good. Jack tells her what happened to Tom, and she cuts the conversation off and leaves. Jack returns to his office, where he receives a call from Sadie, who has gone to the hospital. She tells him that that Tom is still unconscious and that Willie wants to see him.

At the hospital, Willie informs Jack that a specialist is being flown in, and he tells Jack to get Lucy. Once she arrives, Lucy and Willie nervously bicker in the waiting room, and he maintains that Tom will be all right. Adam, who is treating Tom, tells Jack that Tom is unconscious and paralyzed--he has just a chance of being all right. Downstairs, Jack runs into Sadie, who has been waiting there as Willie and Lucy have been waiting upstairs, and who desperately forces Jack to tell her what happened. Finally, Jack receives a call from Anne, who is equally desperate for an update on Tom's situation.

After a specialist sees Tom, Adam tells Willie and Lucy that they have a serious choice. Adam could either put Tom in traction and wait it out, or they could perform surgery to find out whether the spinal cord is crushed (in which case Tom would be paralyzed forever) or just being pressed upon, in which case the pressure could be relieved. Adam warns that the surgical option is the more radical of the two and that it could be fatal. Willie tells him to perform the surgery, and Lucy quietly agrees. While they wait, Willie says he will name his hospital for Tom, but Lucy says things like that do not matter.

After the surgery, Adam says that Tom will live, yet his spinal cord has been crushed, and he will remain paralyzed. Lucy and Willie leave the hospital, and Jack tells Anne and Sadie what happened.

Monday morning, Willie's office is flooded by telegrams with condolences. Jack finds there a large group of cabinet members, including Tiny Duffy, who give their sympathy to the Boss personally. Willie walks in and receives their wishes coldly, then dismisses the telegrams. Then he informs Tiny Duffy that he has decided to break the deal with Gummy Larson. Duffy pleads with Willie not to break his word, but Willie is obstinate. Jack tells Willie that Larson would not take as much abuse as Tiny Duffy, and Willie responds, "You got to start somewhere" (532). Later that day, Willie and Sadie have a loud argument that causes Sadie to leave the office in a rush.

That afternoon, Jack receives a message from Anne about an urgent matter. He goes to her apartment, and she is hysterical. He shakes her, and she tells him that Adam visited her earlier and told her that someone had called him and told him about her relationship with Willie. The caller said that the only reason Adam was named director of the hospital was because of Anne, and that because of what Adam had done to Tom, Willie was going dismiss him as director and leave Anne. Then Adam said he would not "be pimp to his sister's whore" and left abruptly. (538) Anne begs Jack to find Adam, and he goes out to search the city.

That evening, Jack leaves messages for Adam all over town. He then waits in the hotel lobby, where he reads the paper and ruminates over the Boss's willingness to use corrupt practices in order to help the poor of his state.

At 9:00 pm, Jack receives Willie's request to meet him at the Capitol, and Jack goes there to find out that his tax bill has passed. He goes to the Senate, where he finds Willie talking to some legislators. Willie and Jack walk through the Capitol lobby, where Jack sees a very haggard Adam. Adam approaches the two, and Willie extends his hand. They shake hands, and then Adam pulls out a pistol and shoots Willie twice. Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman fire on Adam, striking him dead.

Willie is rushed to a hospital and operated on. Lucy and her sister wait alongside Jack. The operating doctor tells Jack that Willie might live and shows him the pieces of lead removed from Willie's body. Jack reflects that Adam had shot his boss with the same gun the two used to shoot with when they were kids.

A few days after the operation, Willie takes a turn for the worse. One evening, he summons Jack to his bedside. He tells Jack that Adam "was all right," then pleads that if he had not been shot, "It might have been all different" (550). Willie dies the next morning. He later has a massive state funeral in the Capitol. Jack concludes the chapter by introducing Adam's funeral in Burden's Landing, which he had attended before attending Willie's.

Analysis

At last, the untenable universe of All the King's Men comes crashing down around Jack Burden. Upon his return to the capital, he refuses to do any more blackmailing for Willie, although he continues to work in Willie's administration. The story of Jack's redemption now takes a backseat to the story of Willie's.

Willie commits perhaps the worst selling out of his political career by awarding the hospital contract to Gummy Larson. The hospital represents all that is good about Willie's intentions. He went to great lengths to get it overseen by the ethical and upright Adam Stanton. By allowing it to "touch filth" through Larson's corrupt deal, however, he has abandoned the last of his principles and his good intent. He is insolent and ashamed, lashing out at the stone-faced Gummy and the victorious Tiny Duffy. He has dug himself into a hole through his dirty game of politics, and his hands are tied in the matter.

The first Stark blood is spilt by the proud Tom, who is punished for his freewheeling pride by the loss of his body. Just as Tom's life is destroyed on the football field in a game he played while abandoning morality in his social life, his father's life ends in the state capitol in the midst of the political game he played while abandoning all scruples.

In the middle of the chapter, Willie tries to repent and undo the damage he has caused by leaving Anne and returning to his wife, and by taking the immediate step of revoking the contract. He is, however, too far in at this point. This revocation causes Tiny Duffy to place the phone call that ultimately ends the Boss's life. Essentially, Willie's decision to reject corruption and change his ways causes his own death in a way that mirrors Judge Irwin's own brave stand in the preceding chapter. Both stands are held in the name of high ideals, and both result in what is essentially self-inflicted death. In this sense Jack is right about people choosing their own demise.

Adam's assassination of Willie is driven by complex motivations. Adam had always had a great deal of animosity towards Willie and his lack of ethics. Essentially, Adam "snapped" after learning that Anne was Willie's mistress. He could no longer tolerate the governor's tyranny. Beneath this level, Adam is also motivated by his chivalrous ideals of the "Old South." Much like Duncan Trice from the story of Cass Mastern, Adam believes in family honor, and in the context of the affair, he considers killing Willie to be his duty. In addition, Adam's brazen assault is functionally suicidal. He has likely accepted guilt for having worked with Willie and for the shame that having done so has brought to his family. At least, he can predict that killing Willie is an action also to kill himself.

On his deathbed, Willie insists that he never did anything to Adam, implying once more the divide between the ideals of Willie and those of Adam. In the midst of his late transformation, Willie was taken down because of Adam's family pride. Essentially, Willie has been the victim of a complex combination of his own machinations and the values of the Old South that seem to violently reject the concept of simple redemption. Judge Irwin's and Duncan Trice's only recourse is suicide; Cass Mastern must spend his life in penance for his misdeed; Willie Stark and Adam Stanton apparently must die.

After Willie's funeral, Jack returns to Burden's Landing because he can no longer to stand to be in the capital and he wants to see Anne, who collapsed after Adam's funeral. He recalls her expressionless mourning at the funeral. He also remembers that a young photographer shoved a camera in her face to get a photo. Jack took him aside and called him a son-of-a-bitch, and the photographer criticized him for having worked for Willie.

At the Landing, Jack and Anne spend a great deal of quiet time alone together. Eventually, Jack starts to wonder who telephoned Adam about Anne's relationship. One day, he asks Anne, but she says she does not know.

Right after that, Jack returns to the capital, where he tries to find Sadie Burke. An operator informs him that she was committed at Millett Sanatorium. Jack meets her there, and she seems very tired. Sadie says that she checked herself in to get rest. Jack asks her who told Adam about Anne's and Willie's affair, and she reveals that it was the work of Tiny Duffy, who ascended to the governorship upon Willie's death. Sadie then says that she was the one who told Duffy to do it. After Willie's death, Sadie felt no guilt until Duffy congratulated her and said that the two "might sure get along" (566). Disgusted by her role in the affair, she immediately left the capital.

Sadie is horrified to have had to reveal her role, but she also is glad to have told someone. Jack, meanwhile, feels somewhat cleansed by the revelation. He tells her that he wants to get back at Duffy, and she agrees to do what she can to help, even though she fears they could not make anything legally stick.

Jack visits Duffy at the Governor's mansion, where Duffy offers him a position as a political operative in the same capacity he fulfilled under Willie. Jack rebuffs Duffy and insults him to his face, then threatens to go public with what he knows about Willie's death. He feels heroic in his act.

Later, Jack receives a letter from Sadie, who has left the state permanently. She has advised him to leave the issue alone, since it could only be used for revenge against Duffy. She nonetheless offers to help with whatever Jack decides to do. From Sadie's letter, Jack feels less heroic and comes to the realization that he remains a part of the system of corrupt politics that brings so much destruction.

Jack spends a short period avoiding Anne and trying to forget the matter. He runs into Sugar-Boy in the library, and he comes up with the idea of telling him of what Duffy did, knowing that Willie's faithful bodyguard would exact revenge. But when he sees Sugar-Boy's murderous expression, Jack becomes frozen, and he tells him that he does not know who killed the Boss.

Three months later, Jack decides to visit Lucy Stark. Her son Tom died of pneumonia earlier in the year. Lucy has adopted the alleged child of Tom and Sibyl Frey, and she insists that the baby is her son's, because "it looks like him" (584). She has named the baby Willie. She insists that her husband was "a great man ... I have to believe that" (586).

Jack returns to Burden's Landing in the summer at his mother's request. She tells him that she has left her husband Theodore in part because of the death of her true love, Judge Irwin. The next day, Jack's mother leaves Burden's Landing permanently. She tells Jack that she will let Theodore have the house. Right before she leaves, Jack's mother asks him what he went to see Judge Irwin about just prior to his suicide. Jack lies and says that they talked about his poor health.

At last, Jack visits Anne and reveals to her that Judge Irwin was his father. He tells her, "if you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future" (598).

Writing from the present, Jack concludes the narrative, framing it as one involving both himself and Willie Stark. He writes that he has stopped believing in the Great Twitch and has accepted responsibility for the things that have happened around him. He mentions Hugh Miller, Willie's former Attorney General, and indicates that he will work for Miller when the good man returns to politics.

Jack is now living in Judge Irwin's home with his invalid non-biological father Ellis Burden. He is married to Anne and is working on finishing the book he began as a graduate student about Cass Mastern. By summer of 1939 he expects to have left Burden's Landing with Anne for good, and to "go out of the house and go into convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time" (602).

Analysis

Jack Burden had spent his entire life avoiding his past: his failed relationship with Anne Stanton, the traumatic departure of his father at a young age, and the detachment set by his mother's subsequent remarriages. He had fallen into periods of great sleep, studied history without understanding it, and aimlessly followed a charismatic leader. Only after a series of earth-shattering events and realizations could Jack be jolted out of his lifelong ennui.

First, Jack recaptured his past. He learned the true identity of his father and the story behind his assumed father's departure. He thus came to sympathize and not resent Ellis. Jack also realized a newfound respect for his mother, whom he once thought to be detached and incapable of love. Her ability to reject the men who had dominated her life out of true love helps inspire Jack to reconcile with Anne.

Second, Jack witnessed the destructiveness of immorality and the bravery that followed redemption. He witnessed the jealousy and corruption that led, through a series of events, to self-destruction. He now has come to understand the effects that one's actions have on others and on oneself. He has come to respect his biological father's bravery in refusing to relent in the face of blackmail.

Finally, through investigating the matter of Willie's murder, Jack has come to realize his own responsibility and guilt. At first, he is relieved by the knowledge that Tiny Duffy had placed the call that resulted in Adam's homicide. But then he is horrified to realize that he was an integral part of the complex system of corruption that killed Willie. The fact that Tiny Duffy was so sure that Jack would work for him proved to Jack that despite his cynical pride, he had been a co-conspirator in Willie's death through his inextricability from the entire process of events. Instead of refusing to dig up dirt in order to blackmail people, Jack agreed to do so with no emotional regard for the consequences of his actions, falsely assuming all along that a lack of evil intent would make him innocent.

Jack acts on his realization by deciding not to use the knowledge of what Duffy had done in order to take him down later. His encounter with Sugar-Boy is his first moral test, and if Jack were to have used Sugar-Boy to put out a hit on Duffy, he would have been no better than Duffy himself. At last, Jack Burden has truly changed, now that he has accepted his past and is beginning to take responsibility for what he has done and will do.

With all of this now behind him, and with his new understanding of agency and responsibility, Jack is able to reconcile with Anne by explaining how he has come to accept his past.

Jack ends up with two people to look up to, Hugh Miller and Lucy Stark. Both represent reconciliations between the values of the Old South and the New South. Hugh is as forceful and as devoted to fixing the political system as Willie, yet he stays away from any element of corruption. Lucy espouses plain moral values of the Old South such as faith and humbleness, yet she is averse to the code of honor that caused Adam to assassinate her husband. As for Willie himself, he appears to have been reincarnated as an innocent baby, who will grow up in the humble country, just as his namesake once did. Ultimately, this is the symbol or reflection of Willie's redemption--a child born of sin but surrounded by infinite hope. Raising the child after all she has endured, Lucy represents the regenerative ability of the Old South's way of life in aftermath of great crisis.

At the end of All the King's Men, Jack Burden is at last capable of accepting the past and its burden. Consequently, he has realized the effects his actions have on others, and now he takes responsibility for what he does. His more realistic understanding of cause and effect has also given Jack the direction in life that he has always lacked. He now understands why Cass Mastern had to repent for what he did, so Jack is now capable of finishing his thesis. He finally is able to leave Burden's Landing permanently.

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