In Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, the main character, Jack Burden, deals with all kinds of existential crises as he "exists towards his death". Knowledge is everything to jack -- it dictates his world. He works for Governor Willie Stark collecting, twisting, and reconstituting his knowledge in Stark's favor. Jack importantly believes that life is one path, virtually uncontrollable, and that each new piece of knowledge we gain moves us closer to omniscience and death. Life, to Jack, is a fuse burning along until it hits a powder keg, which is death, and which is a state of absolute knowledge (he calls it God).
Obviously, Jack fails to realize that he has choices in his life. This is never more apparent than when it is revealed to Jack that the love of his Youth, Anne Stanton (whom he is not entirely over, and whom he should have married but instead has never touched) is having an affair with his boss, Stark. Jack's world falls apart; he believes that he has no choice at all in the matter. Sartre would say that he has come to exist in a state of bad faith. He is denying, outright, his transcendence.
Jack reacts to the situation by falling out of it. He drives alone, non-stop, to California and lays in a hotel bed for a few days straight, making no choices, and not acknowledging his power over his own situation. Sartre tells us that, while Jack is not necessarily free to remake his entire situation, he is still has the free choice to decide how he feels about the situation and what he will do with his life and what he will eat for breakfast, but he does none of these things -- he just lies there in California.
By the time Jack leaves his hotel room to return to Louisiana, his thoughts have arrived at a choice-denying, nihilistic outlook on life that he calls "The Great Twitch". He describes the great twitch like this: "Names [mean] nothing and all the words we speak [mean] nothing, and there is only the pulse of the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through" (p466, 1996 edition). Life, to Jack, has become something without choice. He compares it to a particular Hitch hiker's twitch -- involuntary but ever animated.
Jack ends up reneging somewhat on his "great twitch" when he sees that action and choice are possible in the face of seemingly crushing obstacles. Adam Stanton (Anne's brother, who detests corruption -- especially Willie Stark's brand) finds out that his sister is sleeping with Stark, and he breaks down in a similar manner to Jack (and Willie's wife before them), but Adam refuses to be complacent and to deny his choice and to follow "The They". He accepts that he has choices in the situation, and he realizes his own most possibility by going down to the Capitol and filling Stark full of lead (Adam was shot on the spot.) Adam refused to let obstacles paralyze him but held on to his power of choice until the very end.
This is a great book and I have only scratched the surface of its metaphysics and rich plot line. I apologize for the spoilers, but they are the foundation of the book's existential crises and had to be included.
1 comment:
Unfortunately, I have not read "All the King's Men," so I don't know that my question can be answered objectively, according to the book, or simply from your interpretation of how Jack's character is elucidated throughout the novel. I was intrigued by Jack believing that "each new piece of knowledge we gain moves us closer to omniscience". Assuming that the kind of knowledge of which you speak is objective knowledge, this seems to be directly opposed to Kierkegaard's position regarding objective uncertainty. We learned that subjectivity, not objectivity, is truth because what one can know and prove objectively is limited. Therefore, one must have the infinite passion of subjectivity and objective uncertainty, linked by faith, in order to have truth. So would Kierkegaard agree with Jack's take on "knowledge" or truth?" Does Jack believe that only through God can one obtain absolute knowledge, thus assuming that there exists objective uncertainty?
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