SOURCE: "The Uses of Delay in The Power and the Glory," in Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, Summer, 1994, pp. 211-23.

In the following essay, Malamet examines the narrative function and symbolic significance of delay, hesitation, and suspense in The Power and the Glory.

Just past the midpoint of The Power and the Glory, as the whisky priest is being led to jail, Graham Greene reiterates the feelings of resignation and fear that have hitherto haunted him: "He knew it was the beginning of the end—after all these years…. When would they discover who he really was? When would he meet the half-caste, or the lieutenant who had interrogated him already?" As in a number of Greene's preceding works, such as A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock, a sense of inevitability hangs over the main pursuit of the novel; the priest broods over the...