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.