It was once said that two things in life are inevitable:
taxes and death. In Book Two, Part One of “The Heart of the Matter,” Graham
Greene focuses on the pervasiveness of death and its effects on certain
characters. Death makes its first appearance when the police and military bring
survivors of a shipwreck onto land. Scobie and the French officer carry on a
casual conversation as dying men, women, and children pass them on stretchers.
On the surface, it appears that this does not disturb the men; the French
officer retains a calm disposition and Scobie acts normally. A deeper look,
however, reveals that the Frenchman’s left eyelid “flickered a message of doubt
and distress” (178). Scobie, a pious man, shares some of this doubt. To
paraphrase, he has a difficult time reconciling a little girl surviving forty
days and nights on the open sea only to die on the shore with a loving God.
Death soon rears its ugly head again.
After Scobie receives a casualty report from the doctor,
Greene gives the reader a glimpse of Scobie’s pessimistic mindset: “What an
absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. Point me
out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil, or
else a complete ignorance” (182). These thoughts do not tie into Greene’s
frequently presented theme of a fallen world – they exceed it. Greene presents
Scobie as a man who believes that happiness derived from something good or
positive is wholly unattainable. Scobie can also see death in anything. During
his first conversation with Helen Rolt, Scobie considers a nine-month period of
time. He notices that nine months is the human gestation period, yet points out
that two deaths took place in lieu of a birth.
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| Scobie! Good to see you again. |
Back to the point of death as an inevitable, pervasive force. When Scobie sits with the dying girl, he realizes that death is
unavoidable: “To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky
on one day, or cowardly on another, [death] was presented on a third occasion”
(183). Later, Scobie talks with Fisher, the English schoolboy. He asks Scobie
to read him a murder story. These isolated yet recurring instances point to
death’s overwhelming force in Scobie’s life.
Question: How does the presence of death in Scobie’s life
alter his relationship with Louise? In what ways?
1 comment:
When Scobie watched the bodies being carried in from the shipwreck, the doctor told him that the people would not have much trouble getting over the shock and trauma from the event. “If you survive at all you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of success.” The difference between Scobie and the doctor is that, although we have seen Scobie to be a very fact-oriented person, he is able to look at death from an emotional standpoint as opposed to a medical one. He sees the possibility that due to the stress and shock of being in a shipwreck and then stranded for forty days, the people will not recover. Specifically in the case of the little girl, everybody understands that she will die. However, the doctors brush it off as inevitable, and think it successful even that she survived as long as she did. Scobie, on the other hand, understands how much she suffered, and realizes that she is alone and has been deluded into thinking that she still has family and hope. When he takes on the role of her father in an effort to comfort her, he shows a lot of empathy, which we haven’t really seen him do before. Even though he spent much of his life trying to make Louise happy, he did that out of a sense of responsibility. In this case, he did it out of emotion. To Scobie, the little girl surviving was not a success, but a failure on the hands of the people who fed her false hope to keep her alive and on the God that let her survive only to die.
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