Always in the, wings, urging the character on, is a figure he will have to discern on his own, a figure called, for want of a better name, God.
God, in fact, hardly enters Greene's fiction until A Gun for Sale (1936), when the killer Raven, trapped by a betrayal, reaches out for a God he does not believe in. Later, action is allegorized in God's image, as in The Power and the Glory. The journal entries of Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair show her infidelity with Bendrix pitted against God's will in such a way as to make God an actual character. Consistently, in the key works, Greene used God as a kind of reference. What happens over and over in Greene is like something that occurs perhaps once in Ernest Hemingway's work—near the end of The Sun Also Rises (1926). When Brett Ashley informs Jake Barnes that deciding not to be a bitch is "sort of what we have instead of God," Jake replies, "Some people have God . . . quite a lot." It is usually that way in Greene's religious novels: God either honored in the breach or dishonored in the observance.
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