All the King's Men & Winsburg Ohio

We were given discussion questions for All the King's Men,there were some that never ended up being discussed; most of them are about Jack and his past.
I think Jack works for Willie, because Willie has the ambition that he (Jack) lacks. And so Jack feels more comfortable being told what to do (to put it crudely). Also, working for Willie keeps him from falling back into the cycle of the Great Sleep again.
The knowledge of truth in this novel plays the infamous role of the antagonist. As it is said; “the truth hurts.” The truth in this novel has countlessly destroyed a number of people. The truth that Anne is having an affair with Willie, diminished/ destroyed that image Jack had of Anne. The truth that Judge Irwin's secret is now known by Jack ends up destroying Judge Irwin. The truth that Annabelle Trice and Cass Mastern are having an affair destroys Duncan Trice; and this indirectly destroys Cass Mastern. This leads me to say that the truth definitely does not save any of the characters. In fact it is a lie that saves one of the characters in this book much grief. It is the lie Jack tells his mother. He tells her that Judge Irwin died because of health problems and not any other reason. Jack considers this a present to his mother. When I first read this statement, I didn't really feel the essence of how the lie might have helped her. I understood that it made it so that she didn't face as much grief of having lost the love of her life. But put in the perspective of the fact that the truth had destroyed every other character in some way or another makes it a lot more symbolic and meaningful. Jack called this knowledge of the truth the “end of man” for the obvious reason that the truth really brought an end to more that one man's life. He knows that the truth will also cause the destruction of man.

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I read the chapter “Hands” today in Winsburg Ohio. There was a lot of irony in the chapter because Wing Biddlebaum is described in few different perspectives. The first he is described as someone who can't keep his hands still. They move so fast the look like the wings of a a bird (an imprisoned bird as stated in the book), hence the name Wing. The Second, he as a schoolmaster was described as white (page 32). And that proves his innocence and his purity. The thing I found most awkward about this story was that he constantly banging his fists on some piece of wood, it was always wood. Never anything else. There is a lot of vivid imagery in the story. It says that Wing was “beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board,” you can just see what would have happened to his knuckles. This was a really sad story.