Willie Stark is a character that attempts to conquer knowledge, even though in the end, he is overcome by the forces of knowledge. Willie did not want to be a slave to knowledge, but rather, its keeper. Stark uses information about people for blackmail, to achieve his goals. His goals for political offices ranged from Mason County Treasurer to state governor, senator, and most likely thoughts of presidency. And on the way to get to these offices, Stark had to overpower others with dark knowledge, the secrets people keep. Stark says that “man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (49).” He is saying that every

Adam Stanton grew up as the best friend of Jack Burden, and the son of prominent Governor Stanton. Adam is a character who is a captive of his belief that his father was perfect and that he should live up to the same greatness. Thus he works most of his life striving to be the best, trying to be perfect like his father. He works to be the best in the medical profession, becoming a surgeon. Adam often spends his free time practicing the piano, again trying to become perfect. Jack said that “most of the time when I was at Adam's apartment he would be at the piano (101).” Adam's life, however, is affected by the knowledge of his father's corruption. When Jack gives a photostat incriminating Governor Stanton to Anne, Adam's sister, she then shows it to Adam. “I gave them to him—those things—and he read them and then he just stood there—he didn't move— he didn't make a sound—and his face was white as a sheet and I could hear him breathing (253).” His most basic belief that his father was perfect and that he should be too is shattered as he learns the truth of his father's shady deal. Governor Stanton protected Judge Irwin when he took a bribe. The knowledge of his father's imperfection does not hit Adam in full right away. It is the culmination of the knowledge about his father and the knowledge about his sister that overwhelms him. Adam soon obtains the knowledge of his sister Anne's affair with Willie Stark. Adam believes that Willie appointed him at the hospital not because of his skills, but because he is having an affair with his sister. That makes him, like his father, not perfect. His full realization of his father's imperfection, as well as his own failure, impels him to do something he would not normally do, which is to kill. The knowledge he learned brought him to murder. “In other words, he must have been in the grip of an instinctive withdrawal, which took the form of moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was different f

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