Explication of All the King's Men article
Mark Royden Winchell’s article in the Mississippi Quarterly entitled “O Happy Sin! Felix Culpa in All the King’s Men” is a very interesting read because it really examines the characters of Adam Stanton, Willie Stark, and Jack Burden in a new way. There are some drawbacks to the article however. I think Winchell chose to use too many quotes from other scholarly articles. The assumption could be made that just over half of what is written is in the authors’ own words. Also, although the article is interesting, it is more of a supplementary read to help understand some of the characters better; it does not really critique the novel as a whole. In the article, Winchell argues that in All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren examines the paradox of the “fortunate fall.” Winchell states in his article that the Fortunate Fall is “the fall from innocence and its psychological and moral consequences” (572). Winchell also separates this metaphor into three groups, or “parties.” The first is labeled the “party of hope,” who sees the world as a reborn “Adam”, who still has a chance at being morally righteous. The second, the “party of memory,” views our world as a “moral extension of the old.” The third, labeled “the party of irony,” state . . .
In conclusion, through his article, Mark Royden Winchell gives a convincing argument as to the inner working of three characters. Essentially, I agree with a lot of the points made and I can see the symbolism in each of the characters’ journey to enlightenment. The last section of the article deals extensively with Jack’s reaction to the “fortunate fall”. He uses this device, Winchell writes, in order to deny “that guilt and innocence have any objective meaning”(582). It also talks about many of the things Jack did in the novel, such as the whole “going west” motif. Winchell then focused on the characters of Adam, Willie, and Jack, and how they each confronted their respective fall from innocence. He dies never reaching the knowledge that would redeem him. This introduction as very long, it took three pages before the author even began to examine the characters under this theme. The realism that Willie lives by causes him to be an extremely cynical person, and this is ultimately self-defeating. Winchell makes a good point in saying that Willie is more evolved than Adam in his recovery from fallen innocence, because he chooses to “change the picture of the world he carries in his head” (575). Willie tries to reform, but by then he is already on his deathbed and it does him no good. A few times while reading the novel, I realized that Warren purposely named the character Adam to signify the link to the biblical Adam. I think the point of the scholarly article is to give the reader words to understand ideas he/she may already have formed in their mind. As Winchell put it cleverly, he “exists in a sort of psychic Eden” (574).
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Acceptance Essays
