All the King's Men

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1946

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

After seeing Anne, Jack takes an eight-day road trip to California. In California, he realizes that Anne has been a constant presence in his life, ever since childhood. He remembers the summer when he came back from college and realized that Anne was no longer a girl. They began spending more time together that summer, and their relationship became increasingly romantic.

As the summer dwindled, they began to pull apart. She seemed distant and he questioned her love. Two days before she left to return to school, they found themselves alone in Jack’s family’s house, and they began to undress, believing they were about to have sex for the first time. However, Jack’s mother returned unexpectedly, forcing them to stop what they were doing and rush to get dressed again to avoid being caught.

Over the next year, they wrote to each other and saw each other occasionally, but they were always fighting about their feelings for each other and about the future. As Jack pursued a string of failed careers—getting kicked out of law school, quitting his PhD program, and finally working for a newspaper—he and Anne drifted decisively apart. Eventually he married a girl named Lois, whom he describes as very different from Anne. For a time, he and Lois were happy, and as she says, “perfectly adjusted sexually.” Their marriage fell apart, however, when Jack recognized her as an actual person, and they began fighting over clothes, friends, and the state of their apartment until Jack finally got up and walked out, never seeing her again. Anne, meanwhile, graduated college, came home to be with her ailing father, and had multiple broken engagements. When her father died, she withdrew from the public, working with charities and spending her time reading.

In California, Jack finishes reviewing his life and, feeling the sting of betrayal, changes how he thinks of Anne. He realizes that he cannot lose what he never had.

Chapter 8 Summary

Jack thinks of his epiphany in California as his own secret knowledge, which he calls the Great Twitch, giving him a new, cynical outlook on life, in which he believes nothing matters. Jack begins seeing Adam regularly, and when Adam tells Jack that he will be performing a lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient, Jack asks to watch. Jack joins Adam in the operating room, pretending that the man isn’t real. He is startled by how much the tools of the operation resemble everyday household items. Later, a man named Hubert Coffee offers Adam a bribe to convince Willie to give Gummy Larson the contract. Enraged, Adam punches Coffee and then drafts his resignation. Anne calls Jack and asks him to convince Adam to stay on the job.

Jack thinks that the best way to do so is for Willie to arrest Coffee for bribery. Jack stops himself from suggesting Anne also testify, but she comes to the same conclusion and says she will do so for her brother. Jack warns her that if she does, the affair will come to light. He asks her why she is with him and she says that she loves him and that they will marry once Willie is in the US Senate next year and divorces Lucy. Jack convinces Adam that it is his idea to go after Coffee legally, and when Adam suggests that Anne testify, Jack warns him that the defense will cross-examine her harshly. Adam drops the pursuit of Coffee but is convinced of Willie’s support for him.

Meanwhile, through Tom, MacMurfee finds dirt on Willie. A girl, Sybil Frey, the daughter of a man from MacMurfee’s district, is allegedly pregnant with Tom’s baby. MacMurfee intends to leverage this information to defeat Willie in the upcoming US Senate race. Willie knows MacMurfee does not have enough evidence to sink him, and he begins coming up with a counterattack. Willie decides to approach Judge Irwin to convince MacMurfee to back off. He asks Jack to go speak to Judge Irwin himself and suggests he use whatever dirt he has on him to convince him.

In Burden’s Landing, Jack’s mother begs him not to visit Judge Irwin because he is unwell, but Jack goes anyway. The Judge says he will never support Willie because of his dirty political practices, and Jack explains the situation with MacMurfee, proving that no candidate or politician is completely above such behavior. Despite this, Judge Irwin refuses to help, not wanting to be involved. Jack tries to convince him and even pulls out the blackmail. Irwin admits to his corruption but is confident that none of it will hold up in court. Jack tells him to take a day to think about it. In reviewing the documents, Judge Irwin realizes that Governor Stanton protected him, but still says no to Jack, even telling him that he knows something that will get Jack to stop pressuring him.

Jack goes home, takes a nap, and wakes up to his mother screaming. He runs to her and sees her on the phone. She looks at him and says that he killed his father. Jack realizes that Judge Irwin is his real father. Jack’s mother continues to have a meltdown and a doctor comes and tells him not to let anyone see her. The doctor tells Jack that Judge Irwin shot himself through the heart. Jack begins to wonder why his parents never married, despite the multiple divorces. He also realizes that this is why the man he believed to be his father left them.

Two days later, they bury Judge Irwin, and Jack struggles to decide whether he is to blame for his father’s death. He also thinks of how he has lost two fathers, one weak and good and one strong and evil, in the same day. Jack inherits Judge Irwin’s fortune, built through corruption, and cannot believe the irony of his profiting from the research he did.

Chapters 7-8 Analysis

When Jack finds the facts of Judge Irwin’s corruption, he hesitates to share them with Willie. Wary of Truth as an Instrument of Power, he wants to give Judge Irwin an opportunity to explain them himself. Ultimately, he describes the truth as an irresistible force of nature, thus absolving himself of blame for whatever consequences may befall Judge Irwin: “I knew that I had to know the truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool” (343). This quality of truth—the way one revelation leads to another until the story develops its own inexorable momentum—is a longstanding trope in thrillers and detective stories and is normally understood unambiguously as a force for good. In All the King’s Men, however, it is complicated by Willie’s gravitational force—his ability to make all revelations work to his benefit. Jack knows that the purpose of this truth is to break Adam’s illusions, and he hesitates because he doesn’t want to be disillusioned himself. He doesn’t want his view of Judge Irwin to change. Despite this, Jack cannot resist the need to know the truth, even though it leads to the severe consequence of Judge Irwin taking his own life.

Coffee’s attempt to win the construction bid for the hospital through bribery forces Adam to confront The Corrupting Nature of Power. Adam has always known that corruption is commonplace in the politics of his state, but at Anne’s urging, he has convinced himself that Willie is different. As Jack tries to influence Adam to keep the job as director of the hospital, he works with Adam’s perception of corruption in power:

The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard tried to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too (323).

This narrative presents corruption as pervasive, but it also suggests that at least the hospital remains relatively uncorrupted. In convincing Adam that he has the authority to keep the hospital free from corruption, Jack achieves his goal.

Jack is burdened with the responsibility of convincing Adam that the project is clean, even when it is not, and to do so he must engage deeply in The Politics of Perception. He is so successful in manipulating Adam’s perceptions of Willie that he even manipulates Adam’s perception of himself in the process: “So Adam dropped the idea of the charge, but retained the implied idea that he and the Boss had teamed up to keep things clean for the hospital” (327). Jack suggests to Adam that they take legal action against Coffee for his attempted bribe, seemingly under the direction of Willie. However, Jack also convinces Adam that to do so would pull Anne into an unsavory situation, and wanting to protect her, Adam finds that he is satisfied not taking legal action but believing that Willie would endorse such a move if Adam found it necessary. By encouraging Adam to take legal action, Jack manipulates Adam’s perception of the kind of politician Willie is without Adam and Willie interacting.