Greene and Dostoevsky: literary influences and philosophical themes

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 miserable, just as Green's general is cruel and conniving, his character acts as a motivating force to make the reader wish to not live as he does. Like the Pope, he is cast off in isolation, but willingly so. Like the Pope he has lost his occupation -- but again, willingly so as he has been able to retire from his former civil service job. He has chosen to live underground, that is, away from other people. Over the course of the novel, he self-fashions himself as a superior person. He sees himself as well-read, cultivated, and above the minutia of everyday existence.

However, the reader likely sees him differently. Left with nothing to believe in, the Underground Man simply inflicts his purposelessness, bottled sense of rage against himself, forcing himself to suffer needless physical and psychological pain. He is physically constrained, like the Pope, but by his own will, and his decision to deny God has made him less mobile, less free, in contrast to what advocates of religious denial might suggest. The modern project of denying the supposed constraints of faith actually takes away all freedom of the human will, Dostoevsky suggests in his portrayal of the Underground Man.

Both short works begin, not in the middle of the action, but with a detailed character sketch. The tales only begin to shift to action in the middle, after fully explicating the significance of the main character. In the case of the Pope, the main character is passive, and events happen to him, given his constrained state under a totalitarian regime. Dostoevsky's protagonist writes in his own voice, as if speaking to the reader in the voice of an angry, rambling manifesto that seems to have little narrative purpose, other than to show different facets of the character, and different aspects of his embittered point-of-view. The most animated discussion occurs not during the Underground Man's discussion with an individual, but with himself, as he rages against the ability of human beings to have free will and to know their best interests. This seems like an ironic statement, given how the Underground Man seems to be subverting his own interests at living a fulfilled and engaged life.

The second part of Notes from the Underground is even more experimental in style as Greene's strange fantasia of the future. Dostoevsky returns to the past, rather than propels the Underground Man's narrative forward, or envisions a life without faith. In the second section, the younger, hopeful Underground Man is shown in a futile quest to rehabilitate a prostitute, and is spurned by his friends and any contact he does seek with humanity. This provides a clue to the Underground Man's sense of a lack of a personal connection with others. But rather than find a belief structure to give him some sort of connection, instead the man takes refuge in total disconnection from everything.