The Significance of The Third Man in the Abortion Debate

       I mentioned in one class how the infamous ferris wheel scene in The Third Man could be likened to arguments in the abortion debate.  I would like to elaborate on its use.

       In the scene, Harry Lime, murderer of children and leader of an illicit penicillin ring, takes the main character of the novel, Martins, up a ferris wheel.  Martins, angered by Lime’s involvement, demands an explanation for why he would commit such an atrocious act.  Lime tells him to look down at the people in the distance.  From so far away, they appear to be just dots.  He says: “Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?  If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?...Free of Income Tax, old man...”  Simply put, Lime claims that it is easy to kill when removed from the situation.  It would be much different if he personally walked up to and killed those children in the hospital; this makes it simple and emotionless.

      Now, how is this analogy likened to abortion?  Many philosophers claim that our morality (in regard to human life) stems from likeness to human beings.  For example, no one would have any moral qualms (well, maybe except for hippies) about squashing a bug, whereas if someone were to talk about killing a dog which is more human-like (larger size, man’s best friend, have a likeness of a personality) we would have many more qualms about it.

      Jane English, in her article, “Abortion and the Concept of Personhood,” says that this is often why aborting first trimester fetuses is deemed “OK” by many.  Because in the first trimester, and even in the second trimester, fetuses are small and lack human characteristics, people don’t see them as human and feel that it is fine to abort. (Note: I am not taking a stance on this, just identifying what certain people say).  This is exactly what Lime said.

      Even the Supreme Court itself uses this as a moral standard.  It claims that it is in the “state’s interest” to protect life, and claims that life, or recognizable life, really only begins once the third trimester begins.  Granted, Blackmun (the justice who wrote the majority opinion) does use viability as part of the reasoning, but viability is itself a somewhat shoddy standard, as it fluctuates due to evolving technology.  Hadley Arkes, another standout in the debate, proves that Blackmun’s argument does center around whether a fetus is human in another article, though I won’t get into that here.

      What I find so impressive about Graham Greene is how he can write perfect analogies into his books: analogies that are so effective and sound that they are representative of and literally used in completely other subjects entirely.  It is very interesting to see his work appear in other scenarios.

Thoughts on Greene

    Greene is an incredibly varied writer. His works are all unmistakably "Greene," yet they all have their own style and feel. I never got the sort of  'same story, different characters' or 'same theme, different story' feeling that many other writers give me when I read more than two of their works. Themes and ideas are referenced and called up between stories, but not in the same way. The perspectives on the themes always change. Between The Innocent and The Quiet American, the dynamic between innocence and experience changes immensely. In The Innocent, the narrator's innocence is something precious that has been lost. In The Quiet American, innocence is a kind of insanity.

   Although he is known as a Catholic writer, his 'entertainments' like The Third Man and Our Man in Havana are excellent. He can write an entirely serious character, like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, and funny character like the protagonist of Our Man in Havana, and fit them perfectly with their surroundings to make them believable and engaging. The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory are perfect examples, in my opinion. The two novels are so different, I absolutely despised the latter but enjoyed the former, yet they both have the unmistakable style of Greene. 

    Finally, Greene deals very well with perspective and motivation. He never had a purely evil antagonist; every "villain" has a backstory or some redeeming quality that makes them hard to hate. Every protagonist has character flaws that make us question their motives and their innocence. 

Epigraphs and Epitaphs

In reading through all of the wonderful final responses here to Greene's work, I was again reminded of Greene's chosen epigraph for all of his work:

Our interests's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, the demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in her new French books --
We watch as these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.

First, I love how the poem uses the first-person plural. It's as if we too -- this class -- are right there with Greene in sharing this interest. But I was thinking about how this quotation relates to the runner-up for collected-works-epigraph: "Hate was just a failure of the imagination." As Pico Iyer says, this is Greene's work in seven words. So how do we make sense of both?

Well, I started to think that perhaps, in order to have that interest in the first place, in order to even begin to accept that a murderer could be tender or a thief could be honest, you need to, well, imagine. Hate allows us to conveniently, cleanly write another person off. How easy it is to decide not to try to understand someone: Oh, he's just an angry person, we might think. Or, Forget her: she's just bitter.

What I am trying to say is that the unimaginative person would not be interested in the "dangerous edge of things." For this kind of person, humans can't possibly be, at once, ambivalent; there is no grey for these folks, only black and white. When we begin to imagine -- itself an act of empathy -- what motivates the "honest thief" or the "quiet American" or the "whiskey priest", hate slinks away in defeat because it's lost its simple target. Hate can't tolerate complexity. Hate doesn't traffic in ambiguities. When imagination chances upon a hidden pain in a fellow human being, it forces one to accept that there is more -- much more -- to a person than originally thought. And isn't this love? The acceptance, if not the appreciation for our beloved's contradictions? Isn't this what makes mankind so wondrous?

Character Vs. Character

There are not many authors who can handle such heavy topics quite as well as Graham Greene. After reading through a solid chunk of Greene’s work over the past few months, I have gained a strong appreciation for the ease with which Greene flawlessly integrates hard topics such as the transition from innocence to experience with lively storytelling.

One of the greatest examples of Greene’s ability to address heavy-handed topics in an entertaining fashion is Greene’s masterpiece, The Power and The Glory. In his novel, Greene is able to make a strong commentary on the status of the Church and on religion itself while at the same time entertaining the reader and not forcing any messages or ideals. I find that the way Greene is able to do this is through his use of different characters in order to express and represent different entities. One of his clearest examples of this is the old lady in jail with the whisky priest. Even though she is a minor character who only appears in one scene, Greene is able to frame her character and develop her just enough to show the reader how she represents those the whisky priest feels are misguided by religion. This is easily the factor in Greene’s writing that stuck with me the most and the same factor that I am trying to incorporate into my own writing. By allowing characters to develop freely and affect each other as the old lady affected the whisky priest allows for easier movement and progression in a story while being able to touch on sensitive subjects. Another thing that I enjoyed about Greene’s writing in particular was his use of characters that juxtaposed each other. Building off of the fact that Greene allows his characters to freely develop, he also likely to give the reader a greater understanding of a character by offering another view point from a starkly different character. Greene employs this technique in both The Third Man with Holly Martins and Harry Lime and in The Quiet American with Alden Pyle and Thomas Fowler. In both novels, the two opposing main characters challenge each other on moral issues allowing the reader to choose a side with two equally likeable characters.

Graham Greene is indeed the most interesting man in the world, and his unique writing style only confirms this. I encourage all to read The Quiet American in particular which combines two of Greene’s strongest writing techniques, both allow characters to organically grow and offering a foil character in order to challenge the development of another. Graham Greene will forever have a spot among my favorite authors of all time.

Liking "The Destructors" Does Not Make Me A Psychopath...

            The first two stories we read in this course were “When Greek Meets Greek” and “The Destructors.” Obviously, the former is one of Greene’s entertainments. Oddly enough though, I prefer the frightening and powerful mood of “The Destructors.” I guess that this is because the story is just plain cool. Even its name is cool. But just think about the plot of this story – a gang of kids completely destroys an old man’s house for seemingly no reason. The story raises a lot of questions, all of which lead back to the one central question about this story: Why?

            This story is short, but it is really dense. The whole time, I was questioning why Trevor wanted to destroy the house, why he burned the money, why the gang went along with it, and why Trevor never wanted that house to be able to be rebuilt. Once Trevor decides that they’ll destroy the house, the plot is fairly simple. There are plenty of things to examine throughout the story, but after that point Greene kept me thinking about the underlying question of why this whole thing was happening. And then there’s that scene with Trevor burning the money. I forget how old Trevor is, but that scene was awesome. Two kids, sitting in a house they were in the middle of destroying, burning money. It’s simple, it’s scary, and it was cool. I am convinced that this scene with Trevor had some influence on Christopher Nolan when he wrote The Dark Knight (the greatest movie of all time).

And the character of Trevor is just awesome. Sure, Greene hints at little things that might have pushed the kid off the edge, but, as far as we know, Trevor has no motivation. For me, this was one of the coolest parts of the story, and makes Trevor just that much cooler. Here’s the way I like to think about it: What if Trevor had told the gang that he wanted to destroy the house because he thought that it was ugly or because he hated Old Misery or because seeing the destruction of World War II had affected his fragile psyche causing him to do unspeakable things?  I don’t think that the story would have been that interesting then. There are so many possibilities for Trevor. It reminds me of a theory by a Confucian philosopher that Mr. Hannon told me about in the last trimester. This guy believed that human beings are inherently evil. He says that people seek to do good things. However, one does not seek what one already has. Therefore, people seek to do good because they do not naturally have it. Maybe that’s all that we can understand about Trevor. Maybe he is just evil. But, again, that’s the great thing about him. We can come up with so many different interpretations of who he is and what his motivations are, and no good idea can ever really trump another good idea in this case.

            To me, this is the story to start off a Graham Greene course off with. It’s easy to read, gripping, cool, and extremely thought provoking.

The End

            Graham Greene: spy, traveler, Nobel Peace Prize runner-up, chronicler, lover, inadvertent cinematographer, playwright, author. Whenever Mr. Kiczek brought up something else that Graham Greene accomplished in his illustrious lifetime, I immediately thought back to our first day of class. Mr. Kiczek described Greene as the most interesting man in the world, and I internally scoffed at the comparison to the Dos Equis guy. The Dos Equis actor is most notable for founding a charity aimed at preserving Siberian Tigers. Graham Greene has a three-volume, 2,251 page biography. I’m sorry I scoffed.

            In all seriousness, Greene is by far the best author I’ve read. I know this because I strongly disliked the plots of “The Power and the Glory” and “The Heart of the Matter,” yet still marveled at Greene’s writing after finishing them. Greene develops his characters in a fashion that is both subtle and powerful, a contradictory structure that mirrors his characters’ personalities. Indeed, Greene is the only author I have ever read who transcribes the complexities of humans onto his characters. Many authors use characters as representatives of an abstract theme, which unfortunately often leads to one-dimensional characters that can be fully figured out by the end of the book. Greene wrote in the Quiet American that one human being can never fully know another. Greene applies this concept to his characters, who, as Kyle noted, are contradictory and unpredictable.

Hilarious music and old school Green Day (y)

To reiterate what Andrew, Josh, and Dan said: thank you for offering this elective and sharing your knowledge of Graham Greene with us, Mr. Kiczek.

A Display of Character

The true strength of Graham Greene, in my opinion, is the incredible characters that he creates for each of his works, from the novels to the short stories.  Greene has a penchant for displaying humanity in all of its glory, at the worst moments of the human experience and at the best of them.  His characters are highly complex and rarely do what we, the audience, expect them to.  They contradict themselves (Scobie from The Heart of the Matter is, in the words of George Orwell, “Two halves that do not fit together.”)  Greene does not have heroes and villains, and occasionally it is difficult to tell who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist.  So, when reading a novel like The Power and the Glory, it’s vital to keep in mind who we’re dealing with.

Graham Greene, ladies and gentlemen, here shown making faces at the camera.

This particular book if one in which you can count the major characters on one hand.  Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that a huge amount of time is spent developing each character into a hugely complex and sympathetic individual – particularly the main character, the whiskey priest.  However, the character that fascinated me in particular is the Lieutenant.

The most prominent feature of the Lieutenant is the fact that he is a character practically defined by irony.  His goal is to wipe out religion in the communist state that has been formed in Mexico, and obviously this leads him to oppose the whiskey priest, but of course Greene doesn’t stop there.  He opposes the Church because of their corruption and hypocrisy, feasting and drinking and espousing meaningless doctrine while their parishioners starve and live in squalor.  His whole backstory is a tale of how priests are corrupt and can't be trusted (or left alive, apparently).

Because come on, who can trust a face like that?

Well all right, that’s a pretty good reason; so this is the root of his goal to help and protect the common man of his state.  The irony comes when we take a step back and see what the Lieutenant is actually doing: in his effort to catch the priest, he is perfectly willing to not only take hostages from the priest’s home town, but to execute them if he doesn’t turn himself in to be executed.  To reiterate, these are the people he is trying to protect and save!  But the real mastery of Greene is that we can still sympathize with this character, because even after all of the atrocities that he commits to achieve his goal, the character is so masterfully crafted as to be if not relatable then at the very least understandable.

Now that you mention it, this whole sympathetic murderer thing is starting to get familiar...

This isn’t an isolated incident, of course – remember what I mentioned earlier about having trouble telling exactly who the antagonist is.  Greene has highly sympathetic villains in most of his works.  Take for example Blacker from A Hint of and Explanation; he is by all accounts a wretched, evil old man who, as it turns out, only wants to understand the meaning of community and companionship.  An even more ambiguous example arises in The Quiet American, in which Pyle can arguably be called the antagonist.  He is, after all, murdering innocents in an attempt to realize his foolish and misconceived idea of how the war in Vietnam should be.  In any other story he would probably be cackling madly as he ran off with the damsel in distress, but with Greene writing the book we sometimes have trouble remembering that this is actually the guy who’s blowing people up.

Pictured above: not Pyle

So, in short, let’s keep in mind exactly what it is that makes Graham Greene so great.  He crafts intricate and delicate plots, and his themes are always profound, but what truly drives the plot and what illustrates the theme is Greene’s impeccable character design.  Between the flawed heroes and the sympathetic villains, Greene attempts to display the best and the worst that humanity has to offer.  And while he may be brutal in his description of the bad, he only makes the good all that more sincere and profound.