Renascence

Volume 67, Issue 3, Summer 2015

Essays on Values in Literature

Mary Ann Melfi
Pages 181-198

The Dark Night of the Soul: Suffering the Cure in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case

Set in the Congo, A Burnt-Out Case owes a debt to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel Greene explicitly mentions in his text. However, in Greene’s novel we see an exposition of a redemptive process that is significantly different from Conrad’s dark view of what lies, at its deepest level, within man. Using St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul as a touchstone, Greene illuminates significant stages in his protagonist’s cure from ennui, aridity, and despair. Greene’s Congo is a region of the mind revealing an essential immaturity in man which can be overcome through suffering and the gift of grace.