All The Kings Men Research Paper

Andrew Allen
Mrs. Billings
English IV
9 August 2012
“Oh, I Believe In Yesterday” Everybody has a past. Some may have a wonderful past full of fun events and great deeds, and some may have a terrible past that haunts them every day of their life. Either way, everybody has an eventful history that is full of good memories, bad memories, regrets, and rejoices which we cannot hide from no matter how hard we try. Paul McCartney had a dream one night about his past. This dream caused him to realize how un-thoughtfully he had lived his life in the past and how he had not paid attention to anybody’s feelings but himself. From this dream he wrote the hit record “Yesterday” by The Beatles in which he portrayed his feelings for a girl that he had mistreated. Paul McCartney will always remember how he mistreated the girl, just as the rest of us will remember certain events in our pasts. In the novel, All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren, we see how the past affects the lives of many people. Some people try to ignore their
past-life the best that they can, such as Willie, but many characters throughout the novel are haunted by their own histories. The main character haunted by his own history is definitely Jack Burden, who tends to flash back to his past many times in the novel. Jack Burden is a historian.
He went to State for a degree in history, so he loves the past. Jack, however, does not have that love for his own past. His “father” left when Jack was only four years old, so he became stuck with his crazy mother who seemed to change men like an All-Saints schoolgirl changes shoes. As soon as Jack left home he tried his best to stay away from his mother, but he always came back home to visit her because she raised him up and he felt obliged to see her. Jack was not trying to hide from his mother though; he was attempting to hide from his family’s past. But what he did not realize until later is that nobody can hide from their past because “…nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue…”(228) Our past resembles a part of our identity and our identity can never be taken away. We are who we are and what is done is done, for we cannot change our pasts, we can only attempt to control our
futures. Jack Burden did not only have a haunted history because of what happened in his past, but also because of what did not happen. He fell in love with Anne Stanton at a very early age, but he never acted upon his love of her. Instead of pursuing a future with Anne, he married Lois to try and run away from his past with Anne, but he always had a burning love for Anne and he could never run away from her. When seeing her face he would have “crazy leaps” to the past where he “saw her floating in the water…with her eyes closed and the violent sky above and the white gull flashing high over…”(295) and he never erased these memories from his head. These vivid memories became a part of his past, and his past stayed with him forever. Every time these thoughts of nostalgia came back to him, he thought of his love for her and all of the good times that they had together. She never left his mind and he never became at peace with his past with her until they finally got married. Our history will always stay with us, whether we have a good one or bad one. We gain knowledge from our history from the mistakes and choices we have made. In the end, we learn that we need to accept our past no matter how tainted or horrible, just as Jack did with his family and Anne. Running from the past will never solve any problems, for if we attempt to hide our histories we will never be at peace with ourselves until the day that we die.