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.

Trust No One, Love Everyone

             

            After having read many of Graham Greene’s works this trimester, I must admit that it has changed the way I read literature. When I read that Fowler is not engaged in the situation in Vietnam, I expect him to be distant and withdrawn from the events. Instead, we see Fowler’s opinion seep through at times, until he finally realizes it is impossible to not be engagé. Similarly, when I read that Scobie wants to attain peace, I expect him to head towards that goal rather than go out of his way to involve himself in others’ problems. The Third Man is narrated by a character who is biased, and appears untrustworthy in the beginning. Thanks to Graham Greene, I am not so easily trusting of the narrator any more. That may seem cynical, but in fact, it is eye-opening. You read each word over carefully, thinking whether or not the narrator is telling the truth, hiding a secret, or simply rejecting reality. It’s a step further in critical reading that I would never have discovered without reading Greene.

The whisky priest from The Power and the Glory is my absolute favorite character from Greene’s masterpieces. Despite his flaws and his past, the priest is practically a saint. However, he believes that he is a terrible sinner; he sees the good in everyone but himself. Therefore, we cannot take the priest’s thoughts completely to heart. First, we have to compare them to his actions because actions speak louder than words, especially in this case. The priest’s selfless acts contrast his pitiful state of mind, and Greene leaves it up to us to evaluate which is more important. The Power and the Glory also includes the famous, wonderful insight: “Hate was just a failure of imagination.” This is actually a very Christian notion. Everyone’s situation is different, and if we look hard enough, we can find the origin of someone’s faults so that we may then forgive them. Those seven words are packed with so much meaning and wisdom about love, forgiveness, compassion, and even faith, that only Graham Greene could have compressed so much thought into just one short phrase.

Greene’s characters are multi-dimensional and paradoxical. Greene created such genuine characters that it was not even possible to hate the villains. Relating back to his insightful line, every antagonist had some quality that evoked pity or sympathy, removing hatred from the picture entirely. Greene made each character, even the minor ones, multi-faceted and complex so that it was impossible not to get emotionally attached to them, and thus he got a more intense reaction from the reader at the end of a novel.  So reading Graham Greene has taught me not to fully trust the narrator, and to love and forgive, which is paradoxical in and of itself, which only adds to the point that Graham Greene was a tremendous author. 

The Dynamic Fowler

       Although I have found many Graham Greene characters to be interesting, I can easily say that Fowler (from The Quiet American) stuck with me the most.  He is an incredibly dynamic character, and the development throughout the novel is astounding.  However, I believe that he best exemplifies someone who changes for the better.

       At the beginning of the novel, Fowler characterizes himself as utterly devoid of emotion; completely removed from every situation.  Granted, there are periods in which he does appear to deviate from his norm, but he fits his own mold fairly well.  One of the best examples is his description of Phuong to Pyle.  He describes her as childish and even primal: she will “love” any person who can provide for her best.  It is a blatantly unfair and callous portrayal of the woman he loves.

Yet as the novel progresses, and he is exposed to his literary foil, Pyle, we can see a clear change.  In fact, by the end, he is a completely different man.  First, this is apparent in his outlook on life.  Pyle mentions how he admires Fowler’s “not being involved” (Greene 171).  Old Fowler would have expressed appreciation for the comment.  But our new, evolved Fowler says instead: “There is always a point of change... some moment of emotion” (171).  He has recognized that it is impossible to maintain the facade, and in the proceeding lines, he identifies that it is morally important to do so.  Pyle keep pressing, saying that Fowler hasn’t changed, and still won’t.  Fowler’s response about being able to change: “Not even with this morning? Mightn’t that change a man’s views?”  He clearly implies that a horrific event can change a man’s “view,” but implicit in this argument is that it should change the man’s views.  After all, his actions indicate so (his killing of Pyle).

        Even after he initially made the plans, Fowler is hesitant about going through with killing Pyle.  However, Pyle makes the critical mistake of identifying the deaths as “only war casualties,” saying that the people “died for democracy” (171).  Fowler identifies that this man is not only disillusioned, he is dangerous to society.  He makes the conscious decision of reversing his position, and going through with killing Pyle to save further lives.  He gives up his viewpoint that is important to him for this (remaining uninvolved), recognizing the importance of sometimes remaining partial.

       This is the precise reason why Fowler has become my favorite Graham Greene character.  He is simply interesting - I have never seen character development this drastic, yet this realistic, in any other novel.  But through Fowler, Greene has given a great example of selflessness and of the benefits of refining oneself.  Fowler is an excellent, dynamic character in an excellent, dynamic novel.  Both he and The Quiet American as a whole have made this class more than worthwhile.

The Finished State of the Story

I admit I am not the fastest, most thorough, or most enthusiastic book reader I know. In fact, I am probably in the bottom 5 in at least one of those categories. This is especially shocking upon self-reflection, as I know how much I generally enjoy English classes. This English class has been unlike any other I have ever taken, because I never once thought about what a chore reading might be.

So, I ask myself the inevitable question: why has this class been different? What makes Graham Greene so special?

The answer, I think, is very simple. Greene, more than any other writer I have ever encountered, brilliantly illustrates a scene, allowing the reader to participate in it. This was the most striking characteristic of Greene’s work for me because of how I read. When I’m reading a book, I like to (and almost have to) “watch” what I’m reading, as if it were a movie. When I watch real movies, I can more easily relate to the scene, almost becoming a character in it. Thus, as I convert the words in the book to the picture in my mind I become more involved (or, engagé) in the novel. Greene (I think, like me) greatly respects the medium of film, such that he declared that the film of The Third Man, not the novella from which it was adapted, was "the finished state of the story." This, in my opinion, partially influences his writing style and its ability to make a book come alive.

Greene (right) with Carol Reed, director of The Fallen Idol and The Third Man (both adapted from Greene's work)

Greene accomplishes this in two ways: (1) through the focus on character dialogue and (2) the perfectly vivid depictions of the setting. Just flipping through any of Greene’s works that we read this year illustrates the first aspect. Some pages are only half-filled because of the number of new lines and indents Greene incorporates into dialogues between characters. However, I think the second facet of Greene’s writing is more important in engaging me in the text. Where I noticed it first and most obviously is the beginning of what I consider his best work, The Power and the Glory: “Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr. Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side.” (7) The scene doesn’t end there, but I only have so many words. The first two pages of The Power and the Glory are an archetype of Greene’s ability to create setting, and this makes the job of my cranial-dwelling film editor a lot easier.

It is through this technique that Greene has become one of my favorite writers, and this one of my favorite classes. Thank you, peers and Mr. Kiczek, it has been the most interesting trimester in the world.