SOURCE: "Comedy and Moral Stasis in Greene's The Comedians," in Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1, Fall, 1987, pp. 53-63.

In the following essay, D'Cruz identifies the "comedian" as a chameleon-like figure whose emotional disengagement represents an adaptive behavior to cope with reality in a tragic modern world.

One of the major imperatives in the fiction of Graham Greene is the need to divulge the nightmarish and horrifying quality of reality. Greene depends on sensational and melodramatic detail to authenticate the terrifying excesses of the real world. In his subsequent fiction, having established his universe, Greene studies the screens men create to shelter themselves from reality. The abstract mind proved to be the greatest betrayer of reality. Those with a penchant for abstraction wear the guise of naive idealism, childishness, or an unthinking dogmatism. In The Comedians, as in the earlier novel Our Man in Havana, Greene...