GRAHAM GREENE THE HUMANIST——A Study Of His Novel The Heart Of The Matter

The Heart of the Matter is the most controversial religious novel of Graham Greene, and the best one of all his novels Through the story of a Just and honest police officer-Scobie's fall, the novel gives full expression to the novelist's concerns about human fate and the predicament of human condition. At the same time, Greene's unorthodoxical religious view is fully reflected in the novel. Being interested in both the novel and the novelist's religious view, the author starts the paper-A Study of Graham Greene and his The Heart of the Matter The paper is composed of four chapters. Chapter I is a brief introduction to Graham Greene. It includes his life, his writings and the literary criticism on him. Graham Greene is a remarkable modem English novelist whose achievement is versatile. He produced novels, film-scripts, critical and political essays, travel books and so on. By these writings, which spanned more than sixty years, he becomes one of the finest literary commentators on religious, cultural and political tensions in the twentieth-century. He has succeeded in gaining both critical acclaim and a vast international readership The author of the paper tries to illustrate that Graham Greene is primarily a humanist, and then a Catholic by analyzing his novel The Heart of the Matter Chapter II gives a detailed analysis of the novel: the external causesVand the lnternal causes of Scoble's fall The story is set ln a Britlsh colonyln WL.t Afrlca, a place characterlzed by lts cormptlon, lnJustIce andtreachery, a typ1cal ugly place of Greeneland. The natlves are dlshonest andthey have no moral standards, the colonists always spread rumors and spyon each other In such a comipt and seedy environment, Scobie 1s passedover fOr promotlon just for the reason that he is just and honest. As a resultLouise, hls sensitive wife who ls eXtremely unPopular among the colonistwomen, is hurt, and thelr unhaPpy family life becomes more agonlz1ng.Scobie's daughter died a few years ago, and what keeps hlm and hls wifetogether ls not the love between them bot his over-developed sense of pityand responslbility In order to provide his suffering wife a holiday to SouthAffica, he has to borrow money from an unscruPulous Syran trader andfalls in the hands of Yusef Later on, corrUPtion of the colony and unhaPpylife with Louise motivate his pity and love for Helen, a young woman whois widowed by a torpedoed ship, and he falls into adultery In an allempt ofconcealing the affair, to save Louise's feeling, he is blackinailed to smugglediamonds for Yusef and becomes an unintentional murder of hls faithfulboy Ali. Flnding no way out, he commlts suiclde, an unforgivable sin. Thus,we can see that the conjunction of these tWo causes makes the hero's traglcending inevitable.ChaPter III comments on Greene's unorthodoxical religious viewAlthough with his fatal flpe Major Scobie commits the worst sin inVICathollcism, Greene seems to suggest that he would be saved after all byhls love fOr God and for hls fellow belngs Therefore, we can see thatGreene's rellgious novel does not propagate for Cathollc1sm On thecontrary, Greene expresses hls humanlst ldeas by the comb1natlon ofrellglous elements and the human factors Greene glves hls novel a newdlmenslon by putting hls heroes ln a rellglous sltuat1on, as in The Heart ofthe Matter In th1s way Scoble assumes a hero1c signlficance through hisrelatlonship with God However, in spite of the religious elements, Greeneemphaslzes a universal human love He suggests that any dogmascontradictory to that are meaningless The love for God and for one'sfellow beings does not go against each other: Scobie commlts sins, but hissin ls alleviated by his love. In this sense, we can...