“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 3): Narrator says there are two types of people, a minority with one self and a majority with many

Jack Burden, the first-person narrator—while talking with Anne Stanton, a woman he has known for more than twenty years—has the following thought:

“…a person like her—a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us…” (1, pp. 310-311).

The narrator is expressing the fiction writer’s perspective. Since most fiction writers have multiple personality trait, they think it is ordinary psychology and that most people are probably that way.

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