Word: authors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...final words of the book, spoken between Scobie's wife and his priest, seem to indicate where Author Greene's feelings lie: "Father Rank said, 'It may seem an odd thing to say-when a man's as wrong as he was-but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.' 'He certainly loved no one else,' she said. 'And you may be in the right of it there, too,' Father Rank replied...
...deep that it has escaped the notice of reviewers, and will probably escape most of his readers. He seems to be saying that Scobie-though, God knows, no saint-is in reality a very likable, perhaps admirable, and probably forgivable sinner. And the implicit sympathy with which Author Greene watches his "hero" plod doggedly from one crime to the inevitable next-adultery, sacrilege, murder and suicide-seems to show that Greene is on Scobie's side. He is certainly in Scobie's corner (he is his handler); but he is not necessarily on Scobie's side...
...successful is Graham Greene's irony? The reader sees (and shares) the author's sympathy for Scobie, and can easily miss the irony beneath that sympathy-or, noting it unawares, can find it ambiguous or confusing. Is it any part of Author Greene's purpose that readers should misconstrue the nature of Scobie's sinfulness-misconstrue it, in some cases, all the way to sainthood? Obviously not. But if an author is widely misunderstood, the reader is not usually to blame...
...course, that Author Greene shares with some of his readers the sentimental view of Scobie as a hero-without quotation marks. It seems more probable that he tried to write a true tragedy and succeeded in writing a suggestive melodrama, with tragic overtones and ironic implications...
...Author. "Today," wrote Graham Greene shortly before World War II, "our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and those half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever...