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Key Examples in All The King's Men
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Only Prop Missing:
During the visit to the Stark family home in Chapter 1, Jack sees Willie's childhood bedroom and immediately has a rich vision of Willie's childhood. This goes on at some length, beginning as follows:
I looked over at the bed, and the crockery wasn't there. It was the only prop missing. That and a kid with a pudgy face and freckles on his face and sandy hair falling down on his forehead, bending down at the table by a coal-oil lamp—it must have been a coil-oil lamp then—and a pencil in his hand, tooth marks on the pencil where he'd been gnawing on it, and the fire in the trash-burner getting low [...]
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Explanation and Analysis—Little Jack Burden:
Late in Chapter 1, Sugar-Boy drives Jack through Burden's Landing. Jack is overwhelmed with nostalgia and imagines himself as a boy:
Unlock with LitCharts A+At night you pass through a little town where you once lived, and you expect to see yourself wearing knee pants, standing all alone on the street corner under the hanging bulbs [...]. Why, this is Jack Burden. Don't you remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home to eat his supper and kiss his beautiful mother good night and go to bed at nine-thirty.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Same but Different:
Visiting the man he thinks to be his father in Chapter 5, Jack observes the Scholarly Attorney attending to George, the former circus performer he has taken in. The Scholarly Attorney dotes on George, in this moment leaning over him tenderly, feeding him a piece of chocolate, and cooing at him gently. The Scholarly Attorney, while ignoring the man he believes to be his son, looks at this old, insane stranger and calls himself "Daddy." Jack is, understandably, taken aback by this. Looking at the Scholarly Attorney, Jack's imagination bursts into a flashback:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I was looking there at the old man, [...] who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, [...] and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread and the night-black glass with silver [...]
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Teasing Paradox:
Chapter 7 of All the King's Men includes an extended flashback to Jack's first courtship with Anne Stanton, after he learns that she was having an affair with Willie. In his total shock and sadness, Jack sets off on a drive to California and remembers the beginning of his relationship. The flashback begins when he was 21 and Anne was 17. Jack had been friends with Adam since childhood, so he knew Anne, but here he describes seeing her on a fine summer afternoon and immediately falling in love with her:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, and a white little ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile that I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, "Hello, Jack," while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come.
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Explanation and Analysis—Crazy Leaps:
After Jack learns that Anne has started an affair with Willie, he imagines his and Anne's relationship, some decades before. Near the end of this extended flashback in Chapter 7 is one of the climactic moments of the novel. Alone in Jack's mother's house, Anne lies down naked on Jack's bed in a "gentle curling motion." Anne waits for Jack to join her, expecting to have sex for the first time. But Jack hesitates:
Unlock with LitCharts A+At the instant when she closed her eyes, as I stared at her, my mind took one of the crazy leaps and I saw her floating in the water, that day of the picnic three years before, with her eyes closed and the violent sky above and the white gull flashing high over, and that face and this face and that scene and this scene seemed to fuse, like superimposed photographs, each keeping its identity without denying the other.
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