Scoobie Being And Nothingness Analysis

Scobie is impelled by his own moral commitment to defy the conventions of his Church and to challenge its sacred doctrines. Scobie’s relationship with his God becomes more direct and immediate-almost intimate-when it is stripped of the conventional formulas of religion. A dialogue develops between them. Scobie is beginning to see Christ as a direct victim of his own sins. His sense of fatherhood is extended and universalized to a point where even God becomes a vulnerable, exposed being, in need of protection. Going to mass in a state of mortal sin would be like, “striking God when he’s down” (211) or “thrusting the child’s face into the filth of the stable.” (237-38) Christ himself has become a child for him. When Scobie decides to commit suicide to get into an

(265) Sartre believes that there has been a realistic conception of death such that death appeared as an immediate contact with the non-human. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre says: “Death is no longer the great unknowable which limits the human; it is the phenomenon of one’s personal life which makes of this life a unique life - that is, a life which does not begin again, a life in which one never recovers his stroke. Hence one becomes responsible for one’s death as for his life.” (532) His fatal sense of responsibility stays with him till the end and he reminds us of Arthur Rowe of The Ministry of Fear, to whom it is “right to risk damnation”(Greene 207) for the sake of the people one loves. But Greene in The Heart of the Matter, shows that Scobie in spite of everything is a good man, and his sins are-not really sins but an intermingling of certain unfortunate incidents leading him ultimately to commit suicide. There is something Christ-like in his self-sacrifice; “Christ had not been murdered: you could not murder God: Christ had killed himself.