Monday, February 3, 2014
Moxley Blog Post #1
Jack's tone in the beginning of All the King's Men seems to be emotionless and indifferent, but it is hard to determine as it masked by his overtly Southern diction and questionable grammar that is characteristic to the South. As the first chapter opens, Jack is describing driving down the highway towards Mason County in the back of Willie 'The Boss' Talos's Cadillac, detailing what could happen if you "hypnotize yourself" staring at the line dividing the road. "But if you wake up in time and don't hook your wheel off the slab, you'll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound like God-a-Mighty had ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands." (pg. 2) While Jack is only describing the loud noise a car makes when it passes you on the highway, the familiar Southern "God-a-Mighty" makes the whole incident seem flamboyantly dangerous and exciting. Whether Jack is describing various events in his everyday life or he is telling a story, his tone is hard to discern under the thick blanket of his Southern diction: "The saws sang soprano and the clerk in the commissary passed out the black-strap molasses and the sow-belly and wrote in his big book, and the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all way merry as a marriage bell." (pg. 3) In that quote, Jack chronicles the affects of saw mills on a small town, hiding his slightly woeful tone amongst a camouflage of 'sow-bellies' and 'Confederate dumbness'. The lack of apparent tone in Jack's narration provides a slightly mysterious air to the story, as it's rather unusual that you can't really tell what the narrator is thinking or feeling in books. As the book continues, Jack's tone will surely become easier to recognize and understand, but for now it's uncertainty is appreciated, as it adds another layer to the story.
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What and interesting idea! I completely agree with you for some parts of the chapter; it got pretty hard to decode how Jack felt under all of the Southern diction. But I also was reminded about when he was taking notes for Boss and reflected on his safety-deposite box full of little black books. Jack thought, "A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books"(p30-31). This depicts very clearly exactly what Jack thinks about the world and it wasn't buried beneath a pile of Southern slang. Although, he often does make the reader work to figure out his tone, he doesn't overdo it and sometimes even hints at his negative outlook.
ReplyDeleteWhat does the quote show about Jack?
DeleteCharlotte, I loved what you said about the "thick blanket of Southern diction" that is consistent throughout the chapter in Jack's voice and in the dialogue between characters. The Southern banter is made more appealing by its unfamiliarity to me. I have very little experience with the South, and many of Robert Penn Warren's words seem ambiguous and irrelevant, but I do notice that the author seems to be familiar with Orwell's rules of writing as outlined in his piece "Politics in the English Language." For example, this "blanket" is rarely what would be classified as 'pretentious diction' because it is colloquial to the region and the imagery used is the farthest thing from stale, such as the sentence: "Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of the light which we could never quite get into for it was always splitting the dark just in front of us." Jack's voice has the ability to spin poetic, authentic, words from a cow on the side of the highway but seems less able to express his emotions except in certain instances like Nicole mentioned.
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