Sin and Salvation in the Novels of Graham Greene

Pages:85-86
Pardeep Sharma and R.M Jha (Research Scholar, Monad University, Hapur, UP, and Asst. Prof.HIT Bahadurgarh and B.K. Birla Institute of Engg & Tech., Pilani, Rajasthan)

Religion is an important force in our contemporary world. The idea that modernity would be secular was established as a dominant thought in the twentieth century. He has always been reluctant to discuss the spiritual conflict that caused him to turn to the Catholic Church. Greene has brought back to the English novel this religious sense. Greene is not only a marvellous story-teller and a master of suspense, but he also dealt with such soul reaching problems as faith, salvation and damnation in his major novels. Green’s development as a novelist reveals above all an attempt to restore to English novel two qualities which it had lost, one, the religious sense, and two, the sense of importance of the human act. Greene has deep sympathy for the exiled or outcasts of our conventional society. Almost all his heroes are rebels against the social norms. He has never portrayed the sinless person or attempted a portrait of unsullied goodness. And Greene’s works, especially his trio-logy, show his own obsession, that his religious obsession. For Greene the ideas of “Good” and “evil” are much more important than the idea of “niceness” and “decency” or even of “right” or “wrong”. He has presented this very view through the action of his main characters. A close reading of Greene’s novel’s especially ‘The Power and the Glory’, and ‘The Heart of the matter’, discloses the fact that he sets himself two tasks: first to embody in his novels the general temper and atmosphere of the world, and secondly, to do this by taking such specimens of people as chief characters and by assigning such roles to them as bear unmistakable symptoms and testimony of the modern times.