All the King's Men- Reflection

 The deaths of each person seemed to have been connected in sort of a web pattern. One dramatic event lead to another and so on. That is how life seems to be. The way Jack attempted to escape reality is often times the same way people in the real world try to escape their problems. But running from your own mistakes is not the answer. Good thing Jack realized this in towards the end and finally became “motivated”. If he hadn’t, perhaps he and Anne Stanton would have never gotten married. It is sad to see though, that she had an affair with Willie just because he represented power and ambition. Or did she do it for the money? We may never come to a conclusion. Whatever the reason was, I’m glad they made it work in the end because Jack truly seemed like a lovable character.  Moreover, I do not usually enjoy books that have to do with politics, but I must say this one was quite fascinating. It seems to me that the purpose of this work was to show that everyone is responsible for his or her own actions. Jack refused responsibility and tried to escape reality by heading out to the West, but when it all came down; he was forced to face the truth in the East. He sort of received a wake-up call and the “vibrations” of the spider web, which were the deaths of certain people he knew, caused him to see the reality. In many ways this is my life every day and it is clearly obvious that no one must ever run away from their own responsibility. The plot of the story itself was confusing at times, but things seemed to clear up as the novel progressed forward, such as the story of Cass Mastern. At first I was not sure how it related to anything going on in the book at all, but later I drew the parallel between Jack and Cass. In many ways the story of Cass was a foreshadowing of Jack’s future. The tone of some of the characters seemed as if they were angry at times or powerful, such as Willie. He asserted himself in a very dominant manner and people became submissive under his power. This type of tone made me feel repressed under Willie’s dominance and I too became submissive. The author’s style of writing this novel at first seemed annoying, because he often times wrote long and descriptive sentences. But as I continued to read the novel, I became accustomed to such details and it made the book flow as I read. All the characters and random stories, such as the one of Cass, tied up in the end and gave the novel a meaning.