SOURCE: "Graham Greene's 'The Hint of an Explanation': A Reinterpretation," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 4, Fall, 1971, pp. 601-05.

In the following essay, Coulthard reexamines common interpretations of "The Hint of an Explanation," focusing on Greene's depiction of the character Blacker.

Good fiction, as the saying goes, lends itself to a number of interpretations. But a generation of readers brought up on irony, ambiguity, and levels of meaning has been uncharacteristically eager to accept Graham Greene's widely anthologized "The Hint of an Explanation" as merely a simple moral drama and enthusiastically to praise it as such.

On the surface, the story is simple. A chance traveling companion of a priest retells a story that the priest told him while on a train trip. There is little dramatic interplay between the priest and the narrator. The traveler's retelling of the priest's story is objective, consisting almost entirely...