MERCY, GRACE, SIN IN THE RELIGIOUS VISION OF GRAHAM GREENE, FLANNERY O'CONNOR, AND WALKER PERCY (UNITED STATES, ENGLAND)

With the catch phrase "Catholic novelist" readily at hand, some critics approach the works of Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy as theology rather than fiction. Ideological polemics frequently displace literary judgment. Even when critics read the works as literary texts, the question of doctrinal content tends to overshadow all other concerns. Preoccupied with imputed message rather than the medium, few critics have attended sufficiently to the ways in which these authors give credible life to their fictive creations. This is not to suggest, on the other hand, that doctrinal matters are irrelevant. These authors employ certain Catholic concepts in their works to serve their own purposes. Both art and concept must figure in any valid evaluation.; This study demonstrates that Greene, O'Connor, and Percy focus on different elements as crucial to achieving salvation and use different modes of dramatizing their respective themes. Greene tests what he calls "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God" in the lives of sinners who play out their careers in the most sordid conditions. This study examines five novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case, and The Honorary Consul. Flannery O'Connor dramatizes the intrusion of divine grace in the lives of her characters as a shocking, violent moment of recognition, realization, and reversal. Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and "Parker's Back" serve as examples. Walker Percy diagnoses the existentialist alienation from which his characters suffer and offers Marcelian "intersubjectivity," or Christian community, as antidote in The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Second Coming.; By demonstrating their differences in religious vision and their modes of incorporating their vision into their fiction, this study renders effectively moot any critical argument concerning a lack of artistic freedom in portraying the world as they see it or concerning their having to restrict themselves to edifying parables. The study confirms their claim to being accomplished storytellers.