Literary Analysis: The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory

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Graham Greene was an author who had the good fortune not only to be critically acclaimed but also to be popular through his writings, despite the inescapable Catholic motif of some of his most enduring novels. The notion of good and evil, and the interplay between them in his narratives is central to his concept of what he believes his adopted religion to stand for. However, his musings on morality and what acts of goodness humans are capable of in their lives are not straightforward repetitions of Catholic teachings on the subjects. His work does not read like propaganda. In fact, people appear to catch religion like ‘a disease’ in his narratives, almost unwillingly so. To believe in a God is not to reach salvation. The atheist character is not necessarily the villain, while the Catholic character is frequently among the most sinful of all. To demonstrate this I have chosen to discuss The End of the Affair, a novel in which the subject of God appears unexpectedly halfway through a plot that describes a former lover of a married woman attempting to discover her latest infidelity, and The Power and the Glory, a story of the last priest in an unnamed Mexican state on the run from a prohibitively secular government. They are interesting examples of Greene’s purported views on good and evil because they both contain instances in which the former can very often be discovered amid numerous examples of the latter, and as such the two never seem to be mutually exclusive. They both also explain the two concepts within a Catholic framework, allowing no other form of society to dictate their meaning. I wish to relate this, as others have, to the era in which these novels were published, either during or following the Second World War, a per...

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... is good and evil, and while being aware of a moral code, is unable to follow it. This is seen as a condition of being human, and definitely does not condemn any character that sins, as long as they understand that they have sinned. Those that do not are half-human ridiculous figures that are to be pitied, and prayed for until they realise the error of their ways.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Greene, Graham. The End of the Affair, (Vintage: London, 2004)

Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory (Vintage: London, 2001)

Secondary Texts

Burgess, Anthony. ‘Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 2, Literature and Society. (April, 1967), pp.93-99

Gorra, Michael. ‘On The End of the Affair’, Southwest Review 89.1 (Winter 2004) pp.109-125

Hoggart, Richard. ‘The Force of Caricature’, Essays in Criticism III (1953) pp.447-462

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