Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Yeakle Blog #1
The writing style of Robert Penn Warren in his novel All The King's Men is distinctly flavored with the language of the south and the narrator's experiences. His unabashedly detailed descriptions are not horribly crude, but do not sugar-coat reality either. Unlike typical northern humor, the color of the writing and the comedy of insult in the novel are much more subtle, requiring a fairly extensive vocabulary and thought while reading. The main narrator, Jack Burden, has a cynical outlook as he tells the story, and pleasant images are dampened by his jadedness. "I leaned on the fence and looked off west across the country where the light was stretching out and breathed in that dry, clean, ammoniac smell you get around stables at sunset on a summer day." (43) The placement of "ammoniac" in the image makes a predictable feeling into a mysterious one, as it reflects a pleasant memory tainted with something harsh and chemical-like. Warren's way of describing and characters using commonly understood ideas rather than plain adjectives makes the writing more interesting, such as in "Sooner or later she would start your way like death and taxes." (50) He could have simply said "inevitably" or "reliably" but the use of an old saying conveys the meaning in a more stylistic and southern way.
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Nice job, great quote choice. Even stronger would be if you defined "ammoniac" and added some discussion of how Southerners love scatological references.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Paige. Jack definitely walks the line between being excessively crude or overly poetic. He is very to the point with his descriptions even if they do seem really long sometimes. My favorite example of this is the description of the Talos house on page 33. "It was on a rise, a biggish box of a house, two storey, rectangular, gray and unpainted, with a tin roof, unpainted too and giving off blazes under the sun for the rust hadnt bitten down into it yet... with some crepe myrtles in bloom the color of raspberry ice cream and looking cool in the heat in the corner of the yard and one live oak, nothing to brag on and dying on one side... a big white hairy dog like a collie or a shepherd was lying on the front porch, a little one-storey front porch that looked stuck on the box of the house, like an after-thought." In his very distinct style jack conveys the averageness of the house in a very removed way which he does throughout the book.
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