JOURNEY TOWARDS NATURAL SELF: A KIERKEGAARDIAN ANALYSIS OF GRAHAM GREENE'S FAITH FICTION

Abstract

Being a self and attaining authentic selfhood is at the heart of Graham Greene’s fiction. Especially in his religious novels he traces what it means to live an authentic life with meaning and explores the various ways of attaining natural selfhood. Yet, considering that Greene ends his novels with no clear ends and definitive results, it can be argued that he experiments with different possibilities of selfhood and lets his readers choose the right portrayal of the ideal selfhood. In the light of this information, this study argues that Graham Greene’s religious quartet – Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and The Glory (1940), The Heart of The Matter (1948) and The End of The Affair (1951) – collectively depicts a gradual, chronological formation of an ideal self. They act complementary to each other, and develop and further the main agenda where the previous one leaves off. Thus, as each novel comes to a close, Greene’s idea of natural selfhood is matured and the last novel depicts a fully-developed, perfected portrayal of natural self. Moving from this argument, this study associates Graham Greene’s religious novels to Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s theory of existential stages as outlined in his major pseudonymous works. I argue that each major character in Greene’ faith fiction adopts a Kierkegaardian mode of life, experiments its possibility and moves on to the next stage until the natural selfhood is established. Each major character – Pinkie, the Whisky Priest, Scobie and Sarah – resides in the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages of life respectively. The self starts its journey with Pinkie as the embodiment of immediately sensuous selfhood in the aesthetic stage. Then it moves to the ethical stage with its strict commitment to ethical rules and societal norms characterized by the Whisky Priest and Scobie. Finally, it reaches its full maturity in the religious stage represented by Sarah by resigning from all transient elements. I first introduce the basic concepts of Kierkegaard’s idea of self and explain each stage of life with references to his major works and secondary literature. I create an existential reading framework and define its major concepts to be used for close reading. Later, I analyse each novel with the help of the framework introduced with the close reading methodology adopted. This study makes two major contributions to the literature: 1) Kierkegaard’s influence on Graham Greene’s major works is contextualized. The reciprocity of themes, arguments and discourse presentation style are highlighted in detail in each work. Greene’s imaginative mind as he creates his major characters has been greatly influenced by Kierkegaard’s existential theory of stages. 2) A novel reading framework is introduced based on Kierkegaard’s theory of stages. By extracting the key concepts from each stage, I outline an existential close reading strategy.