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.