Term Paper on "Greene and Dostoevsky"

Term Paper 4 pages (1302 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Green Dostoevsky

Christian Dystopia in Graham Green's "The Last Word" and Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground"

Both Graham Green's "The Last Word" and Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" use a single character's life as a cry of protest against what the authors see as the meaninglessness of modern existence. For both authors, faith was the key to a meaningful life. However, in modernity, this sense of structure and grounding in conventional faith and doctrine is lost. Greene believed that Roman Catholicism was the source of greatest spiritual truth. Dostoevsky was a passionate and ardent believer in the value of Russian Orthodoxy. Faith shaped the lives and the works of both of these authors, yet despite their belief in an old religious tradition, each author was equally modernistic in their style and use of narrative structure.

Both Greene and Dostoevsky construct short works, rather than long, large sprawling novels as was the fashion in the 19th century. Their studies in the dangers of attempting to create an anti-Christian or post-Christian utopia are short, concentrated intense works that focus on the consciousness of a single individual. The authors, to render a sharp portrait or case study, frequently deploy stream-of-consciousness and fragmented narrative to reinforce what they believed to be ancient, eternal truths.

In "The Last Word," Greene's aging, cast-off Pope comes to symbolize the institution the Pope once headed as Pontiff. The tale is set in the future. In the new world, religion has been abolished, and the once great man is now hardly even cognizant of the fact that he was once the Pope. All he has left is a Bible and a broken crucifix he has hidden away, the symbol of the religion he once commanded. He is kept alive, almost as an artifact, seemingly harmless and broken like the crucifix he continues to cling to, barely remembering why they have meaning. All of society is cut off from him -- he is forgotten, and people even ask what and who a Pope 'is' in the story. The Pope was not martyred, to make him a symbol to living Christians back when the general took over the earth, and now General Megrim's plot is successful, for he has divested his new, supposedly ideal non-Christian society of all religious feeling. However there is worship -- worship for the image of Mergrim not for God, which hardly strikes the reader as an improvement.

Towards the end of the story, the Pope is used as a propaganda device, as his former attire from the state museum is brought out, and he is forced to parade around dressed in his formal glory, under the clear command and control of the general. However, the general's first resolve to allow the Pope to live has been changed. The general, fortified with the sight of what the Pope looks like in his former glory (which transforms the Pope internally as well as externally, as the Pope recalls his old days in office) fears the Pope is still a threat. Also, because the Pope is the last Christian, perhaps because Megrim is secure the Pope has been forgotten, finally.

The Pope welcomes his death, secure at least now in the memory of what it was like to be Pope in the long past. Once again, he is treated as a noble adversary by the general before he is shot. The execution-style killing, the cruel general, the populace duped into forgetting -- all of these suggest a totalitarian regime where freedom has been lost, the freedom to believe. Rather than associate religion with superstition, the modern, secular state is what stands against human freedom, the freedom to believe in something willingly, which the Pope embodies.

The narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, instead of standing as an embodiment of faith, like the Pope, stands as a representation of the denial of faith. But he is so unpleasant, angry, and… READ MORE

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