SOURCE: "Loosing the Devils," and "The Last Word" in Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, 1992, pp. 3-16, 70-87.

In the following excerpt, Kelly examines Greene's early short stories, written during his years as a student, stating that in these works Greene worked out the "terrors and frustrations" of his youth. Kelly then discusses The Last Word, a work he feels "conveys a synoptic view of the stages of [Greene's life as a writer."]

Rarely has a writer been more obsessed with his lost childhood than has Graham Greene. In this respect he is clearly the child of the romantic period, whose poets, such as Blake and Wordsworth, celebrate the bright joys of innocence that quickly give way to the dark pains of experience. Greene also found his obsession mirrored in the novels of Charles Dickens, where Victorian society seems dead set upon destroying the bodies...