"He wasn't carrion yet", or the Drama of In-betweenness in The Power and the Glory

Abstract

the structure of The Power and the Glory, which is at the same time a thriller, a parabole or an allegory, spans its characters and readers in a square from which none can escape, either from a spatial, temporal or theological point of view. The places are all closed places, symbolised by the prison that gathers the whole world, intermediate places that nobody can leave. The hunger time between Chronos and Aion, between the historical time of history and the time of the ideal of the characters, between the defined past which hints each of them and the undefined future with a hoped-for delivery, between finitude and infinitude, making the characters of true orphans of time. From a theological point of view, the characters are the victims of an insoluble tension between immanence and transcendence, abandonment and salute, loneliness and feeling of belonging to the community of men, between death and death as a repeat. In this sense, the story told by Luis's mother serves as a remarkable counterpoint to the history of the priest, creating a two-way narrative in which the reader can only settle. The dual nature of writing, between realism and symbolism, metaphor and mesonymies, increases the intermediarity of writing and reading, which forces any simple final interpretation, which Greene tries to counterbalance with a final paragraph which requires rethinking the role of priest and its anonymity throughout the novel. ; La structure de The Power and the Glory qui est à la fois celle d'un thriller, d'une parabole ou d'une allégorie, plonge ses personnages et son lecteur dans un entre-deux d'où aucun ne peut s'échapper, que ce soit du point de vue spatial, temporel ou théologique. Les lieux sont tous des lieux clos, symbolisés par la prison qui assemble le monde entier, lieux intermédiaires que personne ne parvient à quitter. La temporalité hésite entre Chronos et Aion, entre le temps historique de l'histoire et le hors-temps de l'idéal des personnages, entre le passé défini qui hante chacun d'eux et le futur indéfini ...