A Man: A Writer: Graham Greene

This is not a post about the many powerful themes of Greene's masterpiece, The Power and the Glory: it 's about something that might seem trivial but actually merits a closer look: it's about the colon. In Power and the Glory, Greene greatly favors the colon as his punctuation mark of choice, more so, it seems to me, than in any other work I've encountered. For most of us, the colon is used to introduce an elaboration, a list, an identification. But for Greene, it is a crystallizing mechanism, one that bring the previous clause into sharper focus. With each successive colon, the general becomes specific. For some reason, when reading these sentences, I think of a collapsible telescope. The first sentence is the wide base; with its lens, things are merely fuzzy and still seem distant. Pull out the smaller, obscured inner tubes, and the image is brought into fine detail. Here's an example:

"[The whiskey priest] drained the beer: a long glassy whistle in the darkness: the last drop must have been gone" (41).

Certainly, Greene could just leave us with the factual action of "draining the beer." But "the long glassy whistle in the darkness" now makes the fact a crystalline auditory image, and the adjective "glassy" is such a fine detail that only a powerful "telescope" could pick up on. From this, we conclude, in a darkness we share with the narrator and Coral Fellows, that there is not a drop left in the bottle.

Another example, this one about a dog:

"It wasn't anybody she wanted: she wanted what she was used to: she wanted the old world back."

Notice how the narrator's omniscience becomes more and more precise. Each colon whittles down the dog's desire to its essence. We begin with the negative here: to say that the dog doesn't want the priest leaves much open to what she does want. This gets narrowed down in the next sentence, but of course the reader still doesn't know exactly "what she was used to." "[O]ld world" might still be rather ambiguous, but we know enough to glean that the mutt exists in a fallen world, one that lacks the comforts and certainties she once enjoyed.

Finally, this sentence, from a particularly powerful section in which the priest encounters a native woman, cradling her child:

"It was a male child -- perhaps three years old : a withered bullet head with a mop of black hair: unconscious, but not dead: he could feel the faintest movement in the breast" (150).

In this close third-person narration, our speaker carefully brings the boy into focus. The broad stroke of "male child" sharpens to the delicate sensitivity of the "faintest movement" of the boy's heart. As the reality of the situation takes form for the priest, the precariousness of the situation is brought into high definition.

Perhaps it's because of the third-person narration of The Power and the Glory that we see such a 'writerly' attention to form. The first-person narrators of The Third Man and The Quiet American, a detective and a journalist, respectively, are men of facts, who would probably prefer to lead with the crystallized image than let it come gradually into focus over the course of a sentence.