Jack Burden's Season Stats

The past couple of weeks in class, project discussions on All the King's Men were assigned and done. There were several very interesting and intellectually stimulating discussion topics such as analyzing whether a character was evil or immoral, studying Warren's use of time in the novel, and analyzing the father figures in the novel, but the one that stood out the most was the topic regarding Jack Burden and his evolving approaches to life that occurred throughout the novel.
In the novel All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren essentially chronicles Jack Burden's life seemingly starting from his middle ages and utilizing flashbacks to provide the reader with insights into his early life. Although the novel does not move chronologically, Warren still shows us that in his younger years, Jack was an idealist, he fact that he himself admits in the novel. In the lengthy flashback that Jack has after finding that Willie has been having an affair with Anne Stanton, Jack revisits his high school and college years. These years were filled with Jack and his ability to view everything in positive shade, a stark difference from the pessimism and apathy he exhibits later on in the book. In the flashback, Jack Burden takes on a naive and romantic view on life, a view that is centered around Anne Stanton. In the scenes of summer love depicted through the flashback, Anne Stanton is portrayed as an almost angelic being. She is described as a perfect being, able to stop his reality and ingrain her image into his very soul. As the novel goes on, Jack continues to evolve and eventually reaches a new philosophy.
After his the scene where Jack leaves Anne and attends college, he slowly begins his transition into the Great Sleep state of his philosophical being, a transition that ends when he decides not to continue his graduate thesis on Cass Mastern. The Great Sleep period is characterized by idleness as well as a need to isolate himself from society. After learning of how Cass Mastern unwittingly led to the death of his friend as well as the loss of his lover, he realizes that the world can be cruel. This cruelty seems to strike Jack and puts him in a daze-like state. Jack seems to believe that no matter what people do in life, nothing will change, essentially saying that living is useless. His habitual idleness, shown through his ritual of going to work and coming back home to go to sleep, augments the gloomy and slow mood of this section of the novel. This stage of his life eventually comes to an end though when he finds that Willie Stark has been having an affair with Anne Stanton. This seems to jolt him out of his reverie sparking the next change in his philosophy.
After hearing of Willie's unfaithfulness with Anne, Jack takes a trip to the West and comes up with a "secret knowledge" he refers to as the Great Twitch. The idea of the Great Twitch is that everybody is controlled by some random impulse in the blood called the Great Twitch. No one has any responsibility for his or her actions or consequences of those actions. He takes solace in this idea because he shield himself from having to take any responsibility for what he has done in the past. In this period, Jack takes more carefree approach to life and is almost smug in it because he believes that he has a secret knowledge that no one else has. After the deaths of Adam Stanton, Willie Stark, and Judge Irwin, Jack Burden seemed to discard the idea of the Great Twitch saying that he had seen many people live and die, and it had nothing to do with the Great Twitch. This marked the final transformation that Jack Burden took essentially ending his cycle of evolving. An end to the season.