“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 2): Stark hears voices, has “parts” or “selves,” and switches from goody-goody to red-neck hick to Boss

I’m a quarter of the way into this novel, and there have been a few passages that refer to Willie Stark’s hearing voices, or having different parts or selves:

“She kept watching his face, which seemed to be pulling back from her and me and the room, as though he weren’t really hearing her voice but were listening to another voice…” (1, p. 92).

“But perhaps the essential part of him was knowing it all the time, only word hadn’t quite got around to the other and accidental parts of him” (1, p. 94).

“Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, inward necessity” (1, p. 147).

However, if you step back from those trees to look at the forest, Willie Stark has had three alternate personalities:

First, there was goody-goody Willie Stark. He was studying very earnestly to better himself and become a lawyer, and he championed good public causes, such as the building of a school, not by a construction company connected to public officials, but by the lowest bidder, even if it did employ black workers (this was the pre-civil rights South).

Second, there was the populist, red-neck hick, demagogue. After his goody-goody self had accepted a draft to run for governor as a third-party candidate, he discovered it was a set-up by one candidate to get elected by having Stark split the vote for the other candidate. After being told the truth, Stark got drunker than he had ever been, and the next day started addressing the crowds as one red-neck hick to other red-neck hicks.

Third, there was Stark as governor. The first-person narrator, Jack Burden, who had previously been a newspaper columnist covering Stark, is now one of Stark’s personal assistants. Burden now addresses Stark as “Boss,” and Stark addresses Burden as “Boy.” This hierarchical etiquette may have been common for a governor and an assistant of the South in those days, but since Burden had known Stark since he was a goody-goody nobody, it seems odd to me.

I know that “power corrupts,” but this is beginning to look like unacknowledged multiple personality.

1. Robert Penn Warren. All the King’s Men [1946]. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996.