Abstract
Graham Greene had once, in refuting the title of a ‘Catholic writer’, referred to his ‘disloyalty’ which, he argued gave him an ‘added dimension of the mind’ in that it saved him from all norms and externally imposed doctrines.1 The ‘virtue of disloyalty’ constitutes the thematic core of The Human Factor. The corresponding image is a ‘… sin without pardon/Breaking the branches and crawling below/Out through the breach in the wall of the garden …’ (p. 193). Greene, in his love of the paradox, has set the story in the world of espionage and intelligence, where loyalties are expected to be unequivocal and sharply marked. Into this world of ‘we’ and ‘they’, this clearly defined battlefield or playground, Greene lets loose the human factor.
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Notes and References
Graham Greene, ‘Why do I write?’ quoted by David Pryce-Jones in Graham Greene ( Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963 ) p. 99.
Hanna Arendt, a letter to Prof. Gershom Sholem, published in Encounter, 22, 1 (January 1964) p. 56.
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© 1988 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
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Erdinast-Vulcan, D. (1988). A Priest without a Church The Human Factor. In: Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09013-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09013-6_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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