"Freedom and Alienation in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock," Albert Camus' "The Plague," and Other Related Texts."
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_________________________________________________________________________Swansea University E-Theses "Freedom and alienation in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock," Albert Camus' "The Plague," and other related texts." Breeze, Brian How to cite: _________________________________________________________________________ Breeze, Brian (2005) "Freedom and alienation in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock," Albert Camus' "The Plague," and other related texts.". thesis, Swansea University. http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42557 Use policy: _________________________________________________________________________ This item is brought to you by Swansea University. Any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence: copies of full text items may be used or reproduced in any format or medium, without prior permission for personal research or study, educational or non-commercial purposes only. The copyright for any work remains with the original author unless otherwise specified. The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder. Permission for multiple reproductions should be obtained from the original author. Authors are personally responsible for adhering to copyright and publisher restrictions when uploading content to the repository. Please link to the metadata record in the Swansea University repository, Cronfa (link given in the citation reference above.) http://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/ris-support/ FREEDOM AND ALIENATION in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Albert Camus’ The Plague, and other related texts. BRIAN BREEZE M.Phil. 2005 UNIVERSITY OF WALES SWANSEA PRIFYSGOL CYMRU ABERTAWE ProQuest N um ber: 10805306 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10805306 Published by ProQuest LLO (2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 BRIEF SUMMARY This thesis is an exploration of the idea of human freedom, with particular reference to moral or ethical choice, and to what extent man can be alienated from his ability to make significant choices. I have chosen two novels in which to contextualise these concepts: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is set in England in 1938, and describes what Greene saw as the spiritual shallowness and tawdry materialism of his society at that time. He explores the situation of a young gangster from a deprived background who sets himself against the world around him, comparing the concept of ‘good and evil’ with the more materialistic idea of ‘right and wrong’. In The Plague, Camus has a similar idea of the shallowness of the citizens of Oran in North Africa, who are woken from their indifference to life by an outbreak of Bubonic Plague. The plague may be taken as an analogy of the Nazi invasion of France and the way in which the French people confronted this threat to their freedom. Both novels are investigated against a background of broadly existential thought, particularly the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus’ idea of the ‘absurd’ and Greene’s Catholicism will also be seen to be relevant. Camus came to believe that freedom can only be achieved through a positive ‘resistance’ to the alienation which threatens out power of choice, and I will argue that the thinking of both writers is consistent with this idea. Also implicit in the work of both Greene and Camus is the notion that freedom can only be achieved by means of a lucid confrontation with the self in the context of a human community, and that the ‘outsider’ must always remain alienated from the freedom which is possible for those who are fully engaged with such a community. FREEDOM AND ALIENATION in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Albert Camus’ The Plague and other related texts. BRIAN BREEZE TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations ii Introduction 1 Part One: An Exploration of Brighton Rock and The Plague 1. Brighton Rock 16 2. The Plague Preliminaries - a Short Introduction to Oran and its Citizens 47 The Journey of Raymond Rambert 58 The Joumey of Father Paneloux 60 The Joumey of Jean Tarrou 68 The Joumey of Joseph Grand 73 The Joumey of Dr Rieux 76 Part Two: Social and Individual Alienation and the concept of Choice 81 3. Authentic Choices 85 4. A Choice of Goodand Evil 96 5. Absurd Choices 116 6. Colonisation and Oppression 130 Part Three: Conclusion 7. Freedom and Resistance 150 Bibliography References 177 Intemet Sources 179 184 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS To avoid unnecessary confusion, abbreviations have been used only for those texts from which I have most commonly quoted. Graham Greene: BR Brighton Rock GFS A Gun For Sale Albert Camus: PL The Plague, Trans. Stuart Gilbert, (1960) OS The Outsider MOS The Myth o f Sisyphus Reb The Rebel INTRODUCTION Graham Greene and Albert Camus were both active during what is generally regarded as a crucial part of the twentieth century: before during and after the Second World War. Both writers explore the moral landscape which may be seen as the natural territory of the ethical concepts of Freedom and Alienation which I wish to investigate in this thesis. I have chosen to carry out my exploration of these concepts mainly in the context of two novels: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, and Albert Camus’ The Plague, although I will refer to a variety of other sources so that the ideas found in the texts may be juxtaposed with other relevant concepts. A certain amount of background will also be necessary - philosophical, social, political etc. - in order that a broad perspective of the situation in which the texts were created and reacted to by both contemporary and modem readers and critics may be provided. Let us begin by looking at some relevant details concerning the novels and their authors. Greene, Camus and the main texts Greene was bom in England in 1904, the son of the headmaster of Berkhamstead school. Camus was bom in North Africa in 1913 into a poor French colonial family; he never met his father, who was killed in the First World War before Camus reached the age of one. Although they may be regarded as contemporaries, their backgrounds may be seen to be sufficiently different to provide us with contrasting viewpoints from which to look at the moral questions which I wish to ask. It is also clear that they were aware of each other’s work; we will see that Camus wrote down quotes from 2 some of Greene’s novels in hisNotebooks, and that Greene annotated the margins of his copy of Camus’ Notebooks. Both Greene and Camus attacked what they saw as the complacency of their respective societies: for Greene, the shallow spirituality of England in the period before World War II, and for Camus, the way that so many of the people of France either lay prone under the Nazi occupation or actively collaborated with the German authorities. The Plague was published in 1947, and has as its subject matter a fictitious epidemic of bubonic plague which infects the North African town of Oran, causing it to be isolated from the world around it. This can be (and often is) read as an analogy of the Nazi occupation of France. There is a sense in which we can regard Camus’ novel as representing the inevitable outcome for a society such as that which Greene had portrayed inBrighton Rock, which is set in the English seaside town of Brighton in 1938. Greene had returned to England in May of that year after having travelled extensively in Mexico, where he had been gathering material for an account of the ‘fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth’' by the revolutionary government of President Calles, and which was to be calledThe Lawless Roads. (Interestingly, while in Mexico he was also adding the finishing touches to Brighton Rock). His description of the contrast which he found between the dreary shallowness of England and the vivid and violent life which he had left behind in Mexico is disturbing: Mass in Chelsea seemed curiously fictitious; no Peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees. It would have seemed shocking, like the Agony itself. We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.^ 3 Britain was soon to begin preparations for a possible war as a response to the developing situation in Europe, particularly following the ‘Anschluss’ - Hitler’s annexation of Austria on March 11^\ 1938 - and the continuing Nazi threat to the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. Yet, despite the obviously worsening situation, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was regularly in contact with Hitler, trying to appease the Nazis with plans for the surrender of part of Czechoslovakia.* He was still, in September, able to refer to the situation in Czechoslovakia as ‘a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, and that ‘it seems ... impossible that [such] a quarrel ... should be the subject of war.’^ Greene, it seems , felt otherwise: ‘How could a world like this end in anything but war? ... the grit of the London afternoon ... the long waste of the Clapham Road ... Victorian houses falling into decay in their little burial grounds.L ater in the year, he describes how: Violence came nearer ..