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Existentialism In Brighton Rock And The Power And The Glory

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By acting in the way he thinks is best for him, he is not only responsible for his own individual life, but also to some extent, for the lives of those connected with him. On realizing that in every one of his acts he is responsible for all other persons related to him, he experiences anguish. For Scobie anguish leads to a leap of faith and by committing suicide Scobie does not reject God, but hopes to obtain God’s mercy and consequent salvation. In The Heart of the Matter too, Greene is concerned with the same existential issues as have been treated in Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, namely the themes of alienation, significance of human love and suffering and the insignificance of the doctrines and ceremonies of Church.
The End of the Affair, like Greene’s other novels foregrounding the existential crisis, is mainly concerned with his leaning towards the force of the irrational, man’s sickening despair effecting the leap of faith and his impatience with the Church and its dogma. …show more content…

He is preoccupied with faith and religion in many of his serious novels. For instance in Brighton Rock, while showing that Pinkie is a product of his social environment and traumatic childhood experiences, Greene also goes on to interpret his condition theologically. Similarly in The Heart of the Matter, while giving a subtle psychological analysis of Scpbie’s sense of responsibility and pity, Greene tries to point out how far Scobie’s actions based on pity can be justified from the point of view of Christian religion. In the same way, while The End of the Affair contains a superb and masterly study of possessive love and sexual jealousy which reveals Greene’s very deep psychological insight into the human mind, we realize at the end of the book that the real theme of the novel is the working of divine grace rather than possessiveness and

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