Word: leper
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...hurled himself into the waves. Loungers looked up, transistor-radio earplugs popped out of ears. Again and again the man plunged into the sea, and a crowd began to gather. Before people knew what had happened, they were listening to the dripping prophet tell the story of Naaman the leper, who threw himself seven times into the River Jordan and was miraculously healed...
...share such desiccation of soul. As British Critic V. S. Pritchett says of Querry-in a sense of contemporary man-"He can face a fact; he cannot feel." In the face of intolerable pain, man responds by anesthesia. His fate, made visible and horrible in the doom of the leper, is death on the installment plan...
...probably the longest, certainly the most intensely sustained metaphor in modern fiction, Greene has made the leper a symbol of modern man, and of the "long disease" of modern life. It is the leper's fate to die piecemeal: limbs, members, features deaden and fall from the still living body. But it is not on these horrors of pathology that Greene's imagination centers. It is the quiet, and some would say merciful, side effect of leprosy-the disappearance of sensation, of the power to feel even pain-which haunts Greene, and which he makes the basis...
Querry, whose name suggests both a question and a prey, has gone in pursuit of his dead self to the ends of the earth. As an uninvited and anonymous guest, he comes to a leper hospital on a tributary of the Congo in what could be either the former French or Belgian Equatorial Africa. The river boat goes no farther, and symbolically, the road is never more than a week's repair ahead of the all-encompassing jungle...
...been so often before in novels, by a British popular journalist, and ex-London Timesman Greene must be presumed to know his type faces. Montagu Parkinson is in the Congo "for the riot," but a rumor about Querry and his newsworthy sanctity causes him to stop off at the leper hospital for a feature story...