Jan Kłos
ISBN: 978-83-7702-542-0
Pages: 228
Format: B5
Year: 2012
Language: English

Freedom and its challenges are always associated with man's concrete situation. Freedom occurs in a certain entanglement that depends on personal and social factors. Because of human bad habits and addictions, the space of freedom may be radically reduced, so that one who is supposed to make a free decision gives up, evades, becomes frightened, and runs away. Similarly, the external situation has an enormous impact on freedom. Man can be born in a totalitarian regime, live in constant fear for himself and his close friends. He may surrounded by informers and traitors; he is permanently deceived.
This book focuses on such heroes. Such is the world of Graham Greene - a writer who had made the experience of freedom the main area of his literary explorations. Nothing is simple and unambiguous in this world, the good walks side by side with the evil, words mean something else than usual. The book invites readers to the world of such difficult challenges of freedom. At the same time it encourages them to abstain from condemning judgments, and consoles them that irrespectively of his circumstances man is a free being. The fact that he is free makes him responsible.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One
Philosophical, Religious and Literary Horizons in Greene's Novels
1.The Philosophical Horizon
1.1. Man as a contingent and finite being
1.2. Freedom as a Specific Human Value
1.3. Other Aspects of Freedom
1.4. The Philosophy of Consciousness and Freedom as Self-Realization
2. The Religious Horizon
2.1. Creation and the Fall
2.2. The Reality of Sin
2.3. The Church and the Sacraments
3. The Literary Horizon

Chapter Two
Greene's Milieu as a Concrete Perspective on Man
1. The Difficulties of the Circumstances
1.1. A Land of Cruelty and Crime
1.2. A Land of Pursuit and Execution
1.3. A Land of Heat and Entrapment
2. Greene's People
2.1. Credo in unum satanum
2.2. Corruptio optimi est pessima
2.3. Dona nobis pacem

Chapter Three
The Recognition of the Truth Within Greene's Milieu
1. Pride
2. Pity
3. Despair
4. Comedy of Errors

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index of Proper Names