tter than the Mexican side of the border. Vivien spent some of her time in Mexico with Greene. He didn’t want her with him, though, so he sent her back to the US. Vivien’s diary said that she was extremely lonely while waiting to get home and that she thought her husband was having some psychological problems. She was missing a sense of caring from her husband at the time. Obviously Greene is seen as having some stress in life while writing this novel. The “whisky”priest is a role model for the Mexicans. They came from a culture that had been deeply rooted in the traditions of the Catholic faith. The narrator in the novel said, “He was the only priest most of them had ever known– they took their standard of the priesthood from him. Even the women.” (Greene- Power 66) The priest was their leader and they followed him. His weakness is shown as he tries to say confession here: “His eyes closed, his lips and tongue stumbled over the absolution, failed to finish.” (Greene- Power 45) Greene tears down an authority figure in the church yet again. It seems as if this whole book is about the degradation of the Roman Catholic church, the priests within it, and all of humanity as well.Greene also incorporated death into the novel. From his ideas of death comes the development of failure. The Power and the Glory’s basis are failure and death. Mexico is full of death at a time when the country was getting back on its feet. Greene has every right to express failure and death in his books, but he takes it too far in this novel. “Death is the condition of this novel: it is its ambiance, its food and drink, its matrix, its lover, its demiurge, even its priest.” (Atkins 181-187) John Atkins explains how he sees death incorporated into the novel in this excerpt of his article. Here death is seen in almost every aspect of the book, especially through the main charac...
