Yeakle Blog #2

As Robert Penn Warren slowly unwraps the story of All The King's Men, the memories and anecdotes of Jack Burden wander through a maze of time that reveals bits and pieces of information, leaving the reader to fit them together. The meandering structure ties into the chronology of Jack's memory, which like all memories, have been stretched and bent and trimmed by his conscience. Warren's loose timeline gives the writing a story-telling, unedited feel, like listening to someone try to explain a long story without any previous planning. As he recounts one event of his childhood, the mention of a person will send him onto a multiple page tangent explaining that character, which will inevitably lead to another memory straying from the present plot. Jack's narration style reflects his own thoughts about time, and the way one's sense of time is warped by the process of remembering. "Time is nothing to a hog, or to history either." (p. 134) As a journalist and student of history, Jack has a good grasp on how the events of the world do not always fall in an orderly, understandable manner, and our memories of events often feel more elastic than the ticking of a clock. He describes his hometown as "Mason city [...] the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle." (p. 75) Not only does the metaphor reflect Jack's childhood memories, but it represents how the culture of Mason City is struck in pre-Civil War times, and whenever something progressive comes up it becomes too tangled in politics and 'gives up the struggle.' When he visits his mother, he describes the way she seemed to separate Jack's time from the rest of the world's time: "She had the trick of making a little island right in the middle of time, and of your knowing, which is what time does to you." (p. 157)  The symbol of an island conveys the feeling of time standing still, which is both peaceful and slightly tense for Jack. Although subtle and overpowered by the thickness of Warren's southern language the fluidity of time is infused throughout the stories, characters, tone, and structure of All The King's Men.