Summary Of Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory

Introduction:

In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of British writers wrote on Mexico: D. H. Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent and Mornings in Mexico; Aldous Huxley in Beyond the Mexico Bay; and Evelyn Waugh in Robbery Under Law. Graham Greene also set his 1939 novel The Power and the Glory in Mexico. Greene drew materials for the novel from his own trip to Mexico the previous year in 1938. He recorded the factual experience in The Lawless Roads, while facts and fiction combined in The Power and the Glory. In this novel, Greene captures the persecution on religion inflicted by the then totalitarian regime in Mexico under President Calles. Greene, during his Mexico visit, saw to his surprise how religious faith, even though suppressed, refused to die down in the face of bullet. The Whisky Priest in the novel becomes the embodiment of this thriving faith in religion

Various other characters find a martyr in him even before he lays down his life. The woman in the Prison says: ‘We have a martyr here’; even the half-caste tells the Priest: ‘You may be a saint for all I know’. The Lieutenant in the final conversation says: ‘Well, you’re going to be a martyr’. After the Priest’s execution, the mother tells her children: ‘He was one of the martyrs of the church’. The Priest himself, however, vehemently denies his status as a potential martyr: ‘There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest’. As T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral emphasizes, one must do the right thing for the right reason. To lay down one’s life with the deliberate purpose of attaining sainthood or martyrdom would tantamount to expression of pride. The more the Priest rebuffs himself for his foibles, the more he shows the quality of humility. At the end, he becomes a Christ-like figure with his participation in human suffering. The novelist also describes him in the image of a sacrificial