Greene, Graham,--1904---Criticism and interpretation

Although the preponderance of modern criticism about The Power and the Glory focuses only on religious themes and concerns, the formal narrative technique of Graham Greene deserves equal consideration. Greene very deliberately and consistently constructs a narrative that uses specific formal devices and linguistic techniques that further enhance a formal rhetorical study of the novel and that augment a thematic analysis of the novel. Greene's formal techniques include shifts in narrative point of view, precise forms of language, changing levels of diction, and specific grammatical devices. By analyzing the narrative techniques and linguistic markers that Greene employs, in conjunction with a theme-based analysis, we achieve great insight into the overall picture of the novel and the state of mind of the characters, particularly the protagonist of the novel, the whiskey priest.

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."