All the King's Men Memory and the Past

Jack doesn't talk about Willie's superb memory often, but it's probably one of the things that explain their mutual attraction. To both of them, memory is everything.

Mason City is stuck in the pre-Civil War days. The old men on that bunch can't quite square the present moment with their memories of the past. Getting time's feet untangled is what drives Willie, Jack, and many of the other characters.

That's some heavy fare for a six year old to swallow. No wonder Jack has issues with Ellis before he learns the truth. In this moment, it seems as if Mrs. Murrell hates Ellis. Why? We don't know for sure. We never hear her side of the story. Not all of the secrets in this novel are revealed.

This is a pivotal moment for the novel. All the sudden we are plunged into shocking antebellum times. Plus, since Cass Burden is the dominant narrator of this section, and since his style is so different from Jack's we need to reorient ourselves.

Jack doesn't consider digging up dirt on Judge Irwin to be an enviable task. All the same, he still feels the familiar pull of "the enchantment of the past." All the dead things in his extended metaphor foreshadow the multiple deaths that will occur when he finds the seemingly dead things he seeks. History is only dead when nobody knows it.

Like Jack, Anne can no more resist the enchantments of the past than Jack can. Also like Jack, she won't be satisfied until she has seen the evidence and analyzed it thoroughly, coming to the most logical conclusion.

This is one thing Jack means when he says he "drowned in West." He couldn't well remember all this stuff when he was in Mason City or Burden's Landing – where everything he needs to remember happened. He needed to get our of town in order to get a perspective on his past with Anne that would allow him to constructively deal with their present situation.

Jack is so hooked on memory that it intrudes on his love life, and Anne's. It will take them almost twenty years to get past the memories of the past. In other words, neither of them will forget that Jack left her cold after undressing her on that rainy night long ago.

Did you guess the Judge was Jack's father at this point? We didn't. But when we learn the truth, we flash back on our memory of reading these lines. Isn't memory nifty, in a grim kind of a way?

This could be this book's motto. The truth of the past might be painful, it might be dirty, it might be ugly, it might get people close to us killed. But it the end it's our only hope for the future.