All The King's Men CCQC #1

Erin Hollander

All The King’s Men begins with a description of a repetitive, new road that stretches to the edge of the horizon and Jack the narrator provides a depiction of what happens should the car veer off the highway. This newly-paved road metaphorically symbolizes life itself and the results of when an individual chooses to take the wrong path in life. “You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at you and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the wine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and you don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won’t make it, of course.” (Warren, page 1) The straight highway that ‘comes at you for miles’ represents life, how it will always be directed towards you, and how people become wrapped up in the possible monotony of it. However, this passage also demonstrates the situation of which an individual can become bored with their tedious life and then choose to take a wrong path. This is characterized by the falling off the shoulder of the black, paved highway. When the author chose to write, “But you wont’ make it, of course,” he is furtively presenting his opinion that once people decide to go off the road of life, they will never be able to recover and return to their old life. In this specific passage, Robert Penn Warren used the rhetorical device of an excessively large, run-on sentence. By utilizing this style of writing, the author enables his audience to effectively feel as though they themselves were falling off that road that he described.