A Kierkegaardian Existential Approach To Graham Greene's "Trilogy"

This thesis examines Graham Greene's 'Trilogy',which includes Brighton Rock,The Power and the Glory and The Heart of Matter,and gives a Kierkegaardian Existential approach to the 'Trilogy',especially with the help of Kierkegaard's view of 'Three stages on life's way'.In this thesis I want to elucidate that Greene's'Trilogy' cannot be identified narrowly as Catholic novels.Quite the contrary,'Trilogy' represents the human conditions.Ever since the Illumination the world is becoming more and more secularized,and human lives divides into three categories of aesthetic,ethical and religious.Kierkegaard aims to lead people to the religious stage,however,Greene prefers to represent the existential crisis and how people made their choices,and he preserves the dignity of free choice no matter which stage the protagonist chooses.In the Preface I'll summarize previous research of the 'Trilogy'.I'll give a short introduction to Kierkegaard's view of stages on life's way.I'll also give a brief analysis about my subject.Chapter One focuses on the protagonist's free choice of aesthetic stage in Brighton Rock.Repelled by the fallen life style of hedonism and out of a need for dignity,the protagonist would rather choose a destructive existential possibility.Chapter Two is about The Power and the Glory.The novel represents two stages of life,one is the ethical stage without any sense of religiosity,the other is the religious stage lacking ethical constraints.Greene explored the ultimate existential possibility of a religious-ethical stage.Chapter Three focuses on the ethical crisis in The Heart of the Matter.The protagonist chooses to stay in the ethical stage while longing for a more higher sphere than ethic,thus makes his unique choice of using his human ethic to undertake God's obligation of helping the suffering.The Conclusion summarizes that Greene's novels are not Catholic novels but a description of human conditions.Greene's novels focus on existential crisis and attach importance to free choices.