The Priest as the Anti-Hero in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

Abstract

This paper concerns the anti-heroism of the hero-priest’s psychological journey in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The priest’s heroic qualities seen in his apparently anti-heroic thoughts and behaviors are introduced and explained in detail to argue for the novelist’s grotesque, mysterious heroism inherent in human anti-heroical tendency. The priest on the run goes through the stage of knowledge about self and humanity defined, above all, by the possibility of sin, and next through his expanded vision of religion and humanity in his compassionate companionship. Also, the priest is characteristic of his constant integrity in his clerical vocation and instinctive involvement with human weak flesh equivalent to Emmanuel Levinas’ face-to-face ethics. Greene’s original treatment of paradoxical anti-heroism is concluded as the main source of the novel’s literary value and aesthetical attraction in this paper.