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Essay on Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory

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Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory

In Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, setting is essential in understanding the spiritual conquest of the main character. The story takes place in post-revolution Mexico of the nineteen-thirties, where Catholicism has been banned. The government has shut down all of the churches and established anti-Catholic laws, jealous of the rising power of the church, and nervous of the corrupt ways in which the church has been dealing with sin. The main character, a nameless "whiskey priest," hopelessly roams the desolate plains of southern Mexico, on the run from the law, as the only priest left who has not denounced his fatherhood. The surrounding communities in southern Mexico refuse to …show more content…

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Everybody the priest encounters will not harbour him because of fear of the law. These barren lands symbolize the priest's feeling of worthlesness and rejection from God, and the feeling of inevitable sin and the impossibility of martyrdom. "'I don't know how to repent.' That was true: he had lost the faculty. He couldn't say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant and he loved the fruit of it... our sins have so much beauty." (p. 128,130) The priest continues to create damage as several innocent members of passing communities are executed by the police for not being able to provide adequate information on the priest's course of action. The priest's developing knowledge of the damage he is creating adds guilt to his anxiety, and he continues to question God about the meaning behind his situation.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state

who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics

who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,

too, and what he had experienced was vacancy- a complete

certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human

beings who had evolved from animals for no pupose at all.

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