Throughout All the King's Men, history plays an important role in the motivations and lives of all the characters. History's importance is most noticeable, not surprisingly, in the story main characters - Willie Stark and Jack Burden - whose lives focus on and, in some cases, depend upon history and how they relate themselves to it. While Willie Stark views history as a tool with which to manipulate people for his own ends, an attitude …showed first 75 words of 1215 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1215 total…you do with the dirt." Burden, on the other hand, separates fact and truth into two distinctly different categories, and while the truth will always give you the facts, the converse is not always true: "I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eyed reproach of the facts."