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All the King's Men (Cliffs Notes)

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"All the King's Men" may have been written by a poet but the poet left all his buttons open. Wow, does he go on. His metaphors grow into tentacular analogies of great length. And the poet in him nods once in a while. A tennis ball does not, for instance, "flash" in the sunlight. A piece of glass may flash, or a disco ball, or an exploding firecracker -- but a tennis ball? The Cliffs Notes are by L. David Allen and they aren't that much help in getting through this wordy book. The Notes cover the novel chapter by chapter. Each is divided into two parts: Summary and Commentary. The summaries consist entirely of quotes from the novel. The Commentaries are abstracts of the chapters, mostly the obvious points. Nothing is made of any felicities or flaws in the prose, and the summaries rarely rise to any level that could be called "analytic." At one point, the summary tells us that Willie has become "Machiavellian", but if you don't know who Machiavelli was or how the allusion ties into the text of the novel, you won't find out here. Allen does, though, pick out the single most important narrative thread that Warren has buried in his prose -- namely that Jack Burden evolves from a semi-objective, history-minded recorder of human behavior, to one who is willing to make judgments about the characters he's observing. (It's the same development that Nick Carraway undergoes in "The Great Gatsby," with the epiphany taking place on Nick's 30th birthday, a maturational milestone in anyone's life.) The Cliffs Notes are helpful but not as much as they could, or should, be.

ok, i was forced to read All teh King's Men for my English class and I thought it was an interesting book...because I also read the Cliff's notes to figure out what went on. the book was worded in such a way that it was impossible to figure out what was going on at certain times and Warren skipped around (time wise, from the 1920's to the 1930's then to the 1850's) that it was extremely hard to figure out what was going on...I think that people should read this book though, because it was a good story. I also found it interesting because the author, Robert Penn Warren, wrote this book as a sort of autobiography, bexause many of the experiences that happened to the narrator, Jack Burder, actually happened to Warren during his lifetime.