Cervantean fictionality in Graham Greene

In The Power and the Glory, Travels with My Aunt, Our Man in Havana, and the short story "Under the Garden," texts in which Graham Greene often alludes directly to Cervantes's Don Quixote, this modern novelist uses Cervantean techniques of fictionality to explore the relation of the fictive and the real. Greene's pervasive theme of escaping a mundane existence and crossing into a new realm, a world created by the character's imagination, is elucidated by Wolfgang Iser's critical concept of boundary-crossing and related categories of transgressive fictionality. Particularly in these texts, Greene demonstrates his literary historical position as an inheritor of the Quixote and of Cervantes's awareness of the novel as, in Robert Alter's phrase, a "self-conscious genre."