Look at this passage from the novel All the King’s Men, a description of a college football game in which the star quarterback, Tom, happens to be the son of the novel’s protagonist, politician Willie Stark. What choices does author Robert Penn Warren make that render this passage more than just a description of a football game? How does it help develop the character of Willie Stark as well as the character of the narrator?
from All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
Which was:
An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the turf which was arsenical green under the light from the great batteries of floodlamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena. Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pairs of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets hurled themselves against men in blue silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.
Which was:
The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like agony, the silence, then one woman-scream, silver and soprano, spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward, flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.
5
Which was:
A man pounding me on the back and screaming—a man with a heavy face and coarse dark hair hanging over his forehead—screaming, “That’s my boy! That’s Tom—Tom—Tom! That’s him—and he’s won—they won’t have a time for a touchdown now—he’s won—his first varsity game and it’s Tom won—it’s my boy!” And the man pounded me on the back and grappled me to him with both arms, powerful arms, and hugged me like his brother, his true love, his son, while tears came into his eyes and tears and sweat ran down the heavy cheeks, and he screamed, “He’s my boy—and there’s not any like him—he’ll be All American—and Lucy wants me to stop him playing—my wife wants him to stop—says it’s ruining him—ruining him, hell—he’ll be All American—boy, did you see him—fast—fast—he’s a fast son-of-a-bitch! Ain’t he, ain’t he?”
(1946)