THE POWER AND THE GLORY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY II.

THE CHARACTER BEING MIRRORED GRAHAM GREENE HIMSELF? I. Secondly, they may be interpreted in view of the theme of lost childhood or innocence in theme, for a majority of green‘s major characters suffer, either physically or psychologically, during their childhood, lose their innocence, and go adrift in life. In the first place, they may be considered in terms of the theme of pursuit in them, for in the world of his novels, a world contingent upon crime and violence, treachery and betrayal, sin and damnation, pursuit, whether physical, existential, or metaphysical, dose play a significant role. Green‘s novels are so complex, and there is so much of ambiguity in them, that they may be viewed from several angles. He speaks a good deal about sin and salvation, damnation and redemption in his fictional works he does not paint his characters in mere black or white, for he is of the view that a saint may be an ex-sinner or that a sinner may be a saint in making. 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‘. 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. 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. This paper deals with the centrepiece of Greene’s Catholic Trilogy, The Power and the Glory, and seeks to explore the imposition of religious dogma on the free thinking creative mind of the author, as well as the techniques and narrative devices that Greene employed in order to transcend the level of pure ideology and transform his work into a piece of superior literary art.' Yet, to call Greene a Catholic novelist seems to be the generalization that obviously excludes some subtler nuances of his artistic vision and does not do justice to the complexity of both narrative and ideological level of his fiction. In his serious novels, he advanced furthermore into the realms of spiritual and gave some of the most elaborate studies of the man’s relationship with the divine. Throughout his long literary career, Greene tended to incorporate serious philosophical themes into seemingly simple and trivial plots of genre fiction, and to reshape many of his genre novels into works of moral and philosophical debate.

'The term Catholic fiction was often used to describe the works of celebrated and controversial British novelist Graham Greene.

The power and the glory book