The Power and the Glory and The Road Compared - Essay Example

? Graham Greene, of “The Power and the Glory”, tackled faith in this book. There are some excerpts from the novel that will be discussed in this paper and the perceived meaning of his writing them. One of the first catching quotes in the novel will be as follows: “Altogether they had shot about five priests —two or three had escaped, the bishop was safely in Mexico City, and one man had conformed to the Governor's law that all priests must marry. He lived now near the river with his house-keeper. That, of course, was the best solution of all, to leave the living witness to the weakness of their faith. It showed the deception they had practised all these years. For if they really believed in heaven or hell, they wouldn't mind a little pain now, in return for what immensities. … The lieutenant, lying on his hard bed, in the damp hot dark, felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh.” (pg. 16) On this part of the book, the lieutenant is the author's method of showing the great contrast between his typical characters who shows great faith and this character who is against everything that his usual characters believe in. In this passage, the lieutenant scorns what he perceives as the weakness of faith. He believes that the priests should have shown more strength of character by enduring the pains that comes with their faith instead of taking the easy way out and proving how worthless their faith now seems to be. “He had been walking all day and he was very tired: he found a dry spot and sat down.When the lightning struck he could see the clearing: all around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company— his aloneness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered—for no apparent reason—a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books, and a young man—a stranger from Tucson—drawing his initials on the pane with his finger—that was peace. He looked at it from the outside: he couldn't believe that he would ever again get in. He had made his own world, and this was it—the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again—fear because he was not alone after all.” (pg.85) In this passage, the author put the character in a weakened state. When he said that in order to get peace, you need human company, it entails the fears of the author who finds himself seemingly afraid of the things that he will have to face on his own. He longs for the trivial things like writing your name on a window pane with your finger, because in his weakened state, he associates that action with the sense of peace that is beyond his grasp at the moment. When he mentioned that he looked at it from the outside, he was pertaining to the feeling that he can never go back and things will never be the way it used to be. Other excerpts from the book will be as follows: “An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest ... He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell.” -Jose (The priest who got married) (pg.18) The way the old priest condemns himself for what he has done made it difficult to hate his character in the book. The author, by giving insights to the personal and inner turmoils of the characters made it possible to humanize them, and in more ways than one, aids in sympathizing with the characters. “It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin—only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it...” “He wanted to say to this man: "Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open—it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy ... it can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don't need a penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough,"... -Priest (pg.97) Some passages are quite depressing, not only because of the context in which they were used in the story but because of the truth that substantiates such statements. The quoted passage about loneliness for one. Life is filled with choices and the characters have made different choices in the story. Most of them face the consequences of the choices they have made while others occupy themselves with criticizing how others made their choices, which is another fact of real life. However, the emphasis in his work lies in the strength of his characters' faith in Christ. Regardless of how weak and worthless certain characters seem to be, Greene shows that the strength of their faith keeps them strong. There were plenty of contradictions. The last priest in Mexico has been turned into a fugitive and the Church has gone underground, illegal by the officials that owning a rosary or a prayer book will land you in jail. Faithful Catholics thirst for the Mass, for the Eucharist, for God, but had to be contented with sporadic celebrations, and to top it all off, there is only one priest left, the Whiskey Priest. The Whiskey Priest is no saint. He is, in his own words, a “bad priest”: alcoholic, battered by hardship, and weighed down by the guilt of a mortal sin committed long ago. There is no one to hear his confession, no other priest in the entire country he can turn to. He knows himself to be damned, but keeps going. He can give God to people, and in his mind that is all he is good for anymore. But despair, he has no doubt of his faith, and in fact, he believes in Christ to the point of despair: knowing himself to be damned, he thinks himself past redemption. Beyond saving, he seeks only to save others. The Whiskey Priest, in his despair, must confront the true nature of his belief in God. It is an irony not lost on him that the main reason he is able to elude the Police is that he so little resembles the fat, glossy, and self-satisfied priest he once was. Time and suffering have filed his features down, like his soul, until only one question remains: Would he die for his faith? The Whiskey Priest can’t picture himself as a martyr; he is a self-confessed coward, terrified of the damnation he assumes awaits on the other side of death, and even more afraid of the physical pain that will bring him to that threshold. Greene’s story is less about whether or not the Priest will be caught than it is about whether or not he will be saved. With this novel, Greene brings all his considerable talent, craft, and gift for suspense to bear on a story that penetrates the heart of one tortured man’s mystery. For all its darkness and intensity, it’s a thrilling, page-turning read: the story is structured essentially as an extended chase across the barren landscape of Mexico, mirroring the even vaster desert spaces in the heart of the pursued Priest. Greene evokes the heat and dust and sweat of the country and its inhabitants with cinematic immediacy. The atmosphere is stifling, almost unbearably intense, and Greene’s capacity for storytelling invention never flags. However, in The Road written by Cormac McCarthy, the story opens after some unknown apocalyptic event has struck. You could say the novel alternates between two settings: the road and excursions away from the road into houses or other possible food mother lodes. Although The Boy and The Man suffer from exposure to cold and from a lack of food, they don't encounter too much danger early on. The Power and the Glory is full of seeming contradictions and paradoxes. For example, the Lieutenant chasing the Priest would have made a far better priest than our alcoholic, despairing antihero. The Lieutenant lives an ascetic life devoted solely to the capture and execution of the last living, professional witness to the faith. He has all the qualities of an excellent cleric; he is fastidious, fair-minded, and just. The same could not be said for the Whiskey Priest, who in his weakness comes to love the oppressed, the suffering, and the sinners as Christ once did. The journey the Whiskey Priest takes in The Power and the Glory is spiritual as well as physical—his own Way of the Cross—a journey that tests his faith and purifies him in repeated baptisms of fire. At one point, he spends his last scrap of money on a bottle of wine to use for mass. It was hard enough to resist the impulse to buy brandy instead. Even worse, the purchase puts him in immediate danger, as wine had become a black-market item since the suppression of the Church. Obligated to disguise his identity from the authorities (who double as black-market dealers, making more money on the side), the Whiskey Priest cannot refuse when one offers a toast of the wine. Soon, another joins them, and another glass of wine is poured. Then another, including the corrupt Chief of Police. The Whiskey Priest is in the Lion’s Den, and is forced to watch the wine passed around, the wine meant to be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. The sequence is a tour-de-force—an arrestingly strange but effective alchemy of Catholic theology, character study, and Alfred Hitchcock-style suspense. It is a sequence that delivers on a visceral and philosophical level at once, serving in many ways as a microcosm for the novel’s impact as a whole. It also highlights Greene’s incomparable gift for expressing profound theological mysteries through gripping storytelling. Imagine thirsting for Christ, and not finding him. How easy it is to take for granted the blessing of the mass every Sunday. Greene uses fiction to express the inseparable connection between man and the divine, and man’s crippled state, his utter dependence on God’s presence and mercy. In contrast, The Road, though similarly tackling hardships and trials, hope came to the boy almost immediately towards the end of the novel though, another family appears on the road, and they take in The Boy. This is a little surprising, because nowhere else in the novel do our heroes meet any good, upstanding travelers. The novel ends on a note of hope: perhaps these small enclaves of compassionate people can survive and eventually rebuild a tolerable world. Greene's approach in his novels are very insightful, touching and at the same time, depressing, particularly in this novel, The Power and the Glory. The insights to the different characters' thoughts and discontent makes it difficult to judge and cast the evil role. Somehow, the way Greene delivered the different perspectives humanizes each character of the book and leads to an understanding of how and why they acted the way they did, and for some others, the amount of grief they suffer for the choices they made makes the readers realize that despite the normal society's tendency to put certain characters on the pedestal, such as the priest, they are also just human who have flaws and weaknesses just like everyone else. Both books are in their own different ways, haunting. Most books are when dealing with human frailties and sufferings but the way they were handled and related in these two books are very intriguing in dealing with human nature, and as a reading to be used in class, both books will be a very interesting read that can be used to expand student's understanding and critical thinking. Read More