The Power And The Glory Graham Greene Analysis

3782 Words16 Pages

Perspectives of Christianity in the Novels of Graham Greene
Pooja Shrivastva
APSU university, Rewa (M.P.)

Greene was indeed a prolific writer, and perhaps he still continues to be Britain’s ‘main literary export’ to the rest of the English-speaking world. It is really amazing that at a time when a considerable number of writers and other intellectuals of the West were learning towards Marxism on account of the Russian revolution of 1917, Greece embraced Roman Catholicism in 1926 at the age of twenty two. Nevertheless, he is a rebel Christian, and in this connection says: ‘I am a Catholic with an intellectual, if not an emotional belief in Catholic dogma’. He speaks a good deal about sin and salvation, damnation and redemption in his fictional …show more content…

This novel, says R.W.B. Lewis ‘is the most traditional of Greene’s novels in both content and construction. As such, it is obviously less representative than The Power and the Glory; as such, it has a special appeal for those who mean by the word novel the kind of work that was typical in the nineteenth century. The very title of Lewis’ book, The Picaresque Saint, is highly meaningful and suggestive. The protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, Henry Scobie, is the deputy Commissioner of police in the British colony on the West African coast. He is an admirable person, responsible, honest and just, so much so that the commissioner of police, his immediate senior, calls him, even if jocularly, “Scobie, the Just”. It is really unfortunate that he is denied promotion to commissionership for no fault of his own. Any other person, placed in a similar situation, would naturally have become utterly indifferent to his or her official duties and social obligations. Henry Scooby, however, is made of different stuff, for, in spite of all humiliations, he preserves his mental cool and generous spirit. He feels extremely sorry for the child who dies in a boat mishap, for he is reminded of his own dead child, but is happy to have rescued Helen, a young girl, who faces imminent death because of her agonizing poor state of health. He takes adequate care of her, accommodates her in one of the abandoned Nissen huts, provides her with food, clothing, medicine and, of course, shelter, and visits her frequently for this very reason. It is for the sake of Helen that he has to take money from one local Syrian merchant named Ali, a smuggler, racketeer and murderer, a ruthless person, at the cost of his avowed honesty and integrity. It is utterly unfortunate that people

Open Document