Robertson ATKM 3

Men

The Scholarly Attorney: It’s hard to see The Scholarly Attorney’s motives because, unlike many of the characters in this book, Jack’s extreme hatred towards him creates a fog and none of these motives are stated clearly. However, we do know that he liked to take in unfortunates, and he did enough good work that the local Mexicans thought he ‘must be a saint.’ The only reason he’s at the top is because I don’t really know for sure that he was directly involved in anyone’s death. 

Adam Stanton: Throughout most of the book, Adam is one of the most consistently good characters, doing his hospital work out of desire to do good, as Jack and Anne discuss while trying to convince him to join the hospital. The only reason Adam even ends up doing so is because they reveal to him the corrupt practices his father had partaken in, and he feels the need to atone for his dad’s sins. Even when he goes crazy and kills Willie, it’s over his sister’s integrity in many ways. 

Cass Mastern: Cass has an affair with his best friend’s wife, which isn’t a very good thing, and afterwards she sells her slave who she thought must know about it, causing Cass extreme guilt. He spends the rest of his life trying to do relatively good deeds, like freeing his slaves, to make up for all the bad he’s done. This does not make him an especially good person, because he’s acting totally out of self interest, but it doesn’t make him as consistently bad as many of the other characters in this book.

Tom Talos: Tom may have been a drunk-driver and a player like his father, but he was just a kid and he didn’t seem to be an inherently bad person. None of the choices he made seem to have effected anybody else as intentionally or as drastically as they effected him.

Governor Stanton: Governor Stanton covered up his friend Judge Irwin’s mistakes, which is nice of him but not necessarily the morally correct thing when it’s being measured out in such a way.

Judge Irwin: The Judge made some mistakes a long time ago, and he probably never thought he’d have to face them again. Obviously, corruption and fraud is not a good thing, especially when it leads to somebody’s suicide, but it happened a long time before the start of the book, and he can’t really be faulted for not telling Jack that he was his father because he probably felt like sharing that news would upset his worldview, and that it was Jack’s mother’s choice. 

Sugar Boy: Sugar boy has had a rough time in life. He had a speech impediment, and he just really loved the Boss a lot. He doesn’t really act relative to any moral compass other than what is best by Willie, which is why he’s down close to the bottom. He killed Adam and he would’ve killed anyone else it took to avenge his death, because Willie, though he may not have respected him, gave the outward appearance of respect, and allowed Sugar Boy a lot more dignity than most of the others.

Jack Burden: Jack Burden can’t even be considered a bystander like a lot of these guys can. Just because he was depressed and didn’t know the Judge was a father doesn’t give him a free pass on blackmailing his own dad into killing himself. Throughout the story he continues to express this sort of extreme apathy and indifference which could be the result of psychological issues and illnesses, like depression, but could also be just a part of the asshole character trait. He has no morals to measure himself by; nothing he does is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in his mind, and he hates himself no matter what so he just does whatever Willie asks him to do and doesn’t care until the last chapter when everyone ends up dead. 

Willie Talos: Willie started off pretty good, but became bad pretty much as soon as he got any real power. He makes Sugar Boy drive him to the Judge’s house late at night, uses Jack’s relationship with him to get his foot in the door, and then insults the Judge in his own home and threatens him until he gets kicked out, all because the Judge had decided to support another candidate for moral reasons. He cares a lot more about winning the election than how to do right by the people; he did whatever would make him look good to the public, put his name on a bunch of buildings, and then focused on taking out his enemies at every level, going as far as to blackmail the fathers of girls his son was involved with, one who was in an accident with him and one who he slept with. 

Tiny Duffy: Tiny Duffy is in the game to win; he truly does not give a single damn for anything that could happen to anyone else besides him, he smiles before he inspires Adam to kill the Boss, he switches sides from being against Willie to for Willie as soon as it’s more beneficial. There isn’t too much on him because for most of the book he’s presented basically as a stupid joke for the Boss to yell at, but after it’s revealed that he killed Willie there’s some insight into what type of person he is.

Women

Anne: Anne isn’t portrayed in a very positive light so it’s hard to remember that she didn’t really do anything wrong throughout the book. She does sleep with a married man, but Willie promises that he’ll marry her, and she’s painted as a very gullible person so maybe she truly believed it. She worked for charities and helped raise starving orphans; if it weren’t for the fact that she’d bruised Jack’s tiny grape ego and stepped out of the box he’d put her into she’d probably be portrayed as good throughout the book. It wasn’t really her fault that Adam got so angry with the idea of her ‘impurity’ that he went and tried to avenge her, and himself, in some way; that was entirely a male ego thing. She and her brother are two of the most active do-gooders in the book. 

Lucy Talos: Lucy is a goddess who literally does not do a single thing wrong, or even slightly unkind, throughout the entire book. She puts up with everything Willie does, and even after he screws her over she pretends to be his wife so he won’t have to deal with the scandal. She adopts her grandchild and gives the mother a hefty some of money to run west with, she cares for her ailing son while Willie screws around in the city, she just kind of accepts everything passively that happens to her throughout the book. She doesn’t actively do anything good but she is basically the least bad.

Phoebe: The only information we have on Phoebe is that she was a slave who was sold off because she knew too much. Based on this information, and taking in how much shit she must’ve put up with from somebody who was willing to sell her off literally because she looked at her the wrong way, I’d have to say Phoebe deserves to be called a good person. Her actual morality is not made visible enough to judge.

Lois: There isn’t actually any reason to believe that Louis did something wrong; like Anne, she’s just a harmless female character who he was interested in at one time, and basically all the issues he had with Lois, as he kind of admits to himself, came from the fact that he refused to see her as anything other than a sex machine from the start. Basically none of the female characters in this list did anything wrong, and if they did it was only because of how much they’d been screwed over by men first.

Jack’s Mom: Jack’s mom lied about who Jack’s father was, but other than that she literally has done nothing wrong, and even that was understandable under circumstances. 

Sadie: Sadie metaphorically put the gun in Tiny Duffy’s hand, who handed it to Adam Stanton, who took an actual gun and shot Willie Talos dead. She was jealous of all the women he was sleeping with, and had actual substantial feelings for him; the only reason she did what she did was because of that. Later, though, she feels guilty enough that she’s willing to confess, publicly if that’s asked for. Overall, Sadie is judged pretty harshly even though she shouldn’t be.

Annabelle Trice: Annabelle Trice cheated on her husband and then sold her slave because she looked at her the wrong way, which is a pretty not good thing and puts her at the bottom of this list. However, none of the female characters have done anything as bad as the male characters, and they’re treated with so much less respect and so much more bias that it’s hard to discern actual character quality from Jack’s stuck-up feelings.