Graham Greene has been called a theoretical or automatic writer, in that he uses the objective perspective, with his narrative point of view roaming around from one image to another and one scene to the next without much commentary. In The Power and the Glory, for example, he presents a man on the run from…
Tag: The Power and the Glory
The Power and the Glory – Literary Devices
Nameless Characters Graham Greene does not give names to several of the key characters in this novel. Readers never even find out the name of the book’s protagonist, who is identified only as ‘‘the priest’’ or ‘‘the whiskey priest.’’ To retain his anonymity, Greene must resort to such obvious omission as having him tell a…
The Power and the Glory – Historical Background – Setting
This novel takes place in Tabasco, a state in Mexico, during the 1930s. Tabasco was the state where the most extreme ideas of the Mexican Revolution were implemented, where intense poverty caused a backlash against the social order that had oppressed the peasantry for more than a century. In the early years of the twentieth…
The Power and the Glory – Themes – Symbols
Catholicism The priest in The Power and the Glory finds his plans for escape foiled on several occasions because he feels that it is his responsibility to perform certain functions. Several times, for instance, he is asked to put his flight on hold because people need him to stay with them and hear their confessions….
The Power and the Glory – Characters
Brigida Brigida is the whiskey priest’s child, born from his one night of drunken passion with Maria more than six years earlier. In his absence, she has grown to be steely and unsentimental, a child of poverty who seems to have no interest in religion. She has adult features, and her face and her cynicism…
The Power and the Glory – Summary
Section 1 Chapter One of the first part of The Power and the Glory begins with Mr. Tench, a British dentist who is hoping to make enough money some day to go home. He strikes up a conversation with an educated stranger who he assumes is a doctor; this is the man referred to in…