Biography Essay

Graham Greene was a writer who lived his life under the torment of faith. In his fictional world, where evil dominates, good-bad men are put in situations where their individual capacities for evil and good inevitably collide, where what is at stake transcends integrity. If the character is really good while seeming bad, nothing will serve him better than his vulnerability. Greene paved hell with heavenly intimations until, finally, innocence—that is, freedom from a controlling guile or cunning—takes over everything, even corruption, and a state that Greene called grace is reached. In Greene's major novels, the protagonist's fall is always fortunate because it strips him of everything, including his disguises: bad Catholic (Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, 1948), bad writer (Bendrix in The End of the Affair, 1951), drunken diplomat (Brown in The Comedians, 1966), flawed clergyman (the whiskey priest in The Power...