SOURCE: "Greene's 'Under the Garden': Aesthetic Explorations," in Renascence: A Critical Journal of Letters, Vol. XVII, No. 4, Summer, 1965, pp. 180-90, 194.

In the essay below, Boardman examines Greene's treatment of aesthetic concerns, including faith, belief imagination, and moral consciousness, in "Under the Garden."

"Under the Garden," first published in Greene's A Sense of Reality (1963), might well have been written as a commentary on his own explorations, his aesthetic discoveries that have invariably been tied to actual journeys, whether to Africa, Mexico, or Indo-China. It is a mythic rendition of his recurrent themes of lost childhood, of a universal "journey without maps," and a quest for "the heart of the matter." As counterpoint to these thematic variations, there are echoes of familiar episodes, characters, and symbols from Greene's other writing.

As far back as 1936, Greene wrote of ". . . legend, figures which will dramatize the deepest personal fantasy and deepest moral consciousness...