Back to the past (Samurai Jack)

Jack has thus far seemed static to the point of inhuman. He has his moments when we see a spark of life  burst modestly from within him, such as when he stands up for the Boss while at dinner with the Judge and his mother and the other couple. We see a little bit too when tells the legislator if he's got a problem with immorality of blackmail then he shouldn't hire folks who are immoral enough to inspire blackmail. When he voices his opinion outside his mind it's witty and no more significant than day-to-day conversation, but sometimes that spark of life becomes visible beneath the words he speaks when the words are short and heavy.

The eventual point is this: Jack Burden is essentially dead. In this present he speaks of, the present being the stretch of time after he leaves Lois and begins working for the Chronicle, the time in which everyone and everything around Jack seems to change but Jack himself, we come to learn that Jack is a faceless, expressionless man and what we get to know about him is told through the past. The past in All the King's Men, from Jack's perspective, is life. The Jack Burden who speaks to us is just the voice box in the throat of a walking carcass.

There are clues that the past is life and the present is death in the first two chapters as Jack reveals the rise of Willie Stark to Governor. But the relationship between the past and present is really explored in Jack's nostalgic memories of his childhood, the years he spent with Anne and Adam Stanton and the Judge Irwin. At first we get just a glimpse of the memories when Jack and Willie visit the Judge and the two pass the "Stanton house, locked up and nobody behind the jalousies, fro Anne and Adam were...grown up and never went fishing with me anymore" (57). Then we meet the Judge who is now dead and who used to take Jack hunting and say "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son" (75), and the sadness in Jack's narration hits like a wistful wind from the years ago and what was then innocence and joy now feels like pain, a numb pain that can even make static Jack shiver.

When Jack was a boy he was innocent, like we all are. He was young and untouched by whatever thorns hide in the bushes and he and Anne used to fish and camp by the sea, and these childhood times stick out most vividly in Jack's mind that no longer sees things vividly. That youth is so vital to Jack that he finds himself visiting his home again, every once in a while and standing in that long white hall by the sea, or gazing at the Stanton House, locked up and the old man dead and Anne and Adam long gone, and walks down the beach until he reaches the charred log on the shore that's good for picnics. He visits these places from the past as if he is trying to relive the moments spent there.

He remembers so well when he and Adam were 17 and Anne was 13 or so and the three of them were on a picnic on the beach and the "clouds had begun to pile...except toward the west, beyond the pines where the light struck through the break" (174) and the conditions were perfect for the formation of a final childhood memory. The image of Anne's youthful, peaceful face resting on the surface of the ocean amid a gathering storm is an image Jack Burden hasn't forgotten. The day he got that image in his mind is the day he started seeing himself as a person. And soon after that Jack Burden went to college, began his dissertation, went to sleep and never woke up. 

The image he got in his mind was this: the image of life, plain and simple, personified. Life is a light with a cloud over it. The cloud is time and it is inevitable. The face is love and it is the vividness of life that glows brighter even as the storm builds further. The light in the distance beyond the pines is the past; the same light that illuminates Anne's face in the water. Past and time and life are all one, for life is motion. 

But life is motion forward. Jack can only look with motion back. When two forces of equal strength act upon one object in the opposite direction, the result is a net force of 0 and the object does not change direction, it does not stop, it just stays as it is and was and always will be. And so Jack is trapped in purgatory. He's miserable for the past and numb to the present and dead to the future.