著者

渡辺 美知夫

出版者

東京女子大学

雑誌

英米文学評論 (ISSN:04227808)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.14, no.1, pp.79-101, 1966-06

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In the present age, men are suffering from a sense of desolation-a privation of communication and of solidarity, and above all, a destitution of love. They are uneasy because they cannot find any positive significance in life. Somerset Maugham's philosophy is based upon his belief that life has no meaning, but Graham Greene could not endure this. He knows, as well as Maugham, the boredom of life, but he cannot stop there. He wants to go beyond the negative view of life. His conversion to Catholicism is obviously a manifestation of this longing. In the process of our pilgrimage of life, however, there is inevitably an alternation of negation and affirmation in one's attitude toward life, like the motion of a pendulum. It seems to me that in his successive works Greene takes away, one by one, the affirmative elements. In Pinkie of Brighton Rock, the romantic idealism of Andrews in The Man Within is not found. The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter do not contain any ideal female character like Elizabeth of The Man Within or Rose in Brighton Rock. Scobie, the hero of The Heart of the Matter, is a victim of an acute sense of the privation of love. Sarah of The End of the Affair is a person who finds herself driven into a blind alley while trying to escape from God. After her death, both her husband, Henry, and her lover, Bendrix, are at a loss, deprived of any impetus to live. After The End of the Affair, Greene concentrates on male characters-Fowler of The Quiet American and Querry of A Burnt-Out Case; both these characters are exiles from the community they originally belong to. A Burnt-Out Case is most typical in describing the privation. The hero, Querry, is a character perfect in his negation, so perfect that the affirmation is hinted only through his unnatural death. In Greene's most recent work, The Comedians, it is said that "a stronger current of optimism runs through the book." If this means a return of affirmation after the utmost negation, we may expect an even loftier stage of affirmationin the work that follows The Comedians.