The Return from the Wasteland A Burnt-Out Case

Abstract

A Burnt-Out Case follows The Quiet American both chronologically and thematically. The Quiet American ends in an impasse, a wasteland where human sin or goodness have lost their significance, and man is left on his own in a stark, seedy reality. A Burnt-Out Case is an attempt to step back from this wasteland and regain the spiritual dimension which endows the human act with significance beyond its immediate motive or consequence. This novel, however, does not lend itself to neat critical formulations as Greene seems to have strained the ‘contract’ between reader and writer beyond its acceptable limits, and the resolution of Querry’s spiritual crisis is not entirely convincing. Having dealt with the problems of the reductive narrative mode and the metaphoric overload of this novel in the first chapter of this book, I would now focus on the concept of fatherhood which functions in A Burnt-Out Case as it does in Greene’s other novels, and highlights the thematic development in the novel in a subtler and perhaps more profound manner than other, more explicit, symbolic devices.