Tragic Irony in Selected Works by Graham Greene

This thesis examines a representative range of Graham Greene‟s works, mostly novels published between 1930 and 1982, and some of his plays and film scripts, with the aim to resituate Greene within the cultural and literary landscape of the twentieth century. It complements contemporary Greeneian scholarship with an analysis of two self-suppressed and generally unavailable novels The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), as well as Greene‟s plays The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957) and Carving a Statue (1964, 1970) and the film treatment No Man’s Land (1950), which are currently outside mainstream critical studies. The focus on tragic irony enables a reappraisal of Greene‟s various responses to some spiritual and intellectual crises of the twentieth century, including his critical examination of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Marxism, Catholic theology and philosophical existentialism, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Martin Buber, as well as earlier pre-existentialist thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno. The study reveals Greene‟s nuanced affinity with literary modernism, especially of the variety developed by Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and postmodernism, specifically, his experimentation with and ultimate rejection of the typical modernist textual strategies. In his later fiction, these were combined with pervasive intertextuality and postmodernist literary techniques, which nevertheless do not mitigate an essentially modernist tragic-ironic vision, centered on epistemological rather than ontological issues and a binary representation of reality. The thesis outlines Greene‟s idiosyncratic model of a flawed hero, within which an ordinary aheroic protagonist acquires a heroic stature in the discourse of existentialist philosophy or Catholic theology. It also highlights two distinctive textual models, an intertextual „literary thriller‟ and a variation of a Catholic novel, which represent Greene‟s significant contribution to contemporary literature that calls for a more comprehensive integration of his fiction into the twentieth-century literary canon.