Willie Stark rises from a rural, young idealistic lawyer and a virtual nobody into a powerful man and through and thorough cynic concerning the nature of man's time on Earth. Stark remarks that there is nothing good about the world and that all men have evil and disreputable pasts, it is simply the job of the politician to make something good out of all the bad in the world. This political horse-trader and power maven has come a long way indeed from the country bumpkin studying law in his father's house. In contrast Jack Burden has grown up a sort-of intellectual drifter, unsure of how to order his life or how to make sense of a world seemingly lawless and meaningless around him. Frequently disillusioned, it is only when his life seems to lose all foundation that Burden is able to reconcile the interconnectedness of things around him. As such Burden comes to understand that he enables both his bosses better and worse qualities and actions. What is good and bad in Willie Stark can be said to be true of Jack Burden as well. They are bound together (along with a cast of other men and women); enabling each other, monitoring each other and eventually providing for their downfall. Whether Warren provides a cynical and tragic account of political power in America is in the eye of the beholder. That he has achieved a probing look into how the lives of men are intertwined, how the decisions of the few can rule the fate of many, and how our interconnectedness has very real implications for our own governance and the governance of society at large is beyond a doubt.
