I really do not like the priest anymore. He is such a jerk. First, he leaves the woman at the plateau. Then, he feels so guilty that he goes back and finds she has left. He then eats the sugar cube that she has left for the child in case he wakes up. The reader hears the priest's thoughts: "He thought: I shouldn't have left her alone like that. God forgive me. I have no sense of responsibility: what can you expect from a whisky priest?" (p. 156).
Also, it bugged me that the priest charged when baptizing the children. "'One pest fifty' A voice from years back said firmly into his ear: they don't value what they don't pay for." (p. 167). Then he was feeling “generous” so he charged half a peso less. I mean I guess it was nice of him to drop his price. However, I felt that he should have be a little more considerate.
I really just don’t feel bad for the priest at all. He should feel guilty. I think that it is right for him to have that sense of shame. In this section, I found he felt the guiltiest, especially with the bath.
Also, the idea of abandonment resonates throughout this section. First, there is the abandoned town. Then, the priest abandons the woman and the child at the plateau. Then, he abandons the amount of money he is charging for the baptism.
Henry David Thoreau once stated in Walden "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor." Write a well organized essay comparing and contrasting characters of both Crime and Punishment and The Power and the Glory concerning the sagacity of the impoverished man in association with Thoreau's quote.
Before, I was musing about what the nameless priest representing the old ways and all that. Now it seems as if the priest’s flaws are becoming more evident or more extreme, and I have to wonder if this is still the case. Certainly, it would be impossible to state he represents some sort of nostalgic idealism of what a nation with religion was like. Perhaps his flaws are supposed to mirror what Greene saw to be the actual flaws of the Catholic Church. He does not focus enough on spiritual matters, but instead on worldly frivolities and decadences, which could represent the Catholic Church’s criticized over emphasis on ceremony. He is constantly berating himself for his behavior, so not even he thinks he, or the old ways, is perfect.
This overall decision to de-romanticize things is consistent throughout the book. The gringo, the outlaw in the story, could have easily fallen into the common archetype of the glamorized criminal. America, in particular, has a way of glamorizing famous criminals, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid. However, in the Power and the Glory, Greene portrays the real pain and devastation such behavior causes with the death of the child. Greene seems to want to strip away our preconceptions and show reality as best he can.
The priest was a sinful clergyman and he finally repents his guilty past in the middle of the novel. However, he is not regretful enough to completely change his ways yet. In Chapter 4, he still abandons the woman and the child although he should not have done so had he wanted to comensate for his wrongful actions. Also, when he is asked to baptize the children he knows that he is too guilty to be a priest and perform such ceremonies but he agrees to baptize. He is also happy that he is safe but such comfort makes him feel uneasy.
This is a series of not keeping to a single thought: doing something but regret doing in the next moment and feeling something but that emotion turning completely different in the next second; This mental schism or travelling back and forth between morality and selfishness resembels Raskolnikov completely.
The priest reminds me of Raskolnikov in another way. According to how we defined a hero in class when discussing the Hard Times, a hero is who undergoes some transformation. In the Power and the Glory, the priest goes through such change. The priest starts out being a complete coward in chapter 4 when he abandones the woman but in chapter 2 gains bravery. Before he was selfish and proud but he develops enough compassion to charge less for baptism and not to escape anymore but bless the dying gringo.
Raskolnikov who changes to a more loving and humble character in the second part had hints of those qualities in the first part. Also, the priest, before becoming more moral and courageous, appears to have conscience and potential humanity (he feels bad for the wrong actions).
First of all, WHERE DID CORAL GO! What happened to the whiskey priest's hideaway? What happened to morse code!? They had so many elaborate plans. I feel so let down and unhappy. After all of that he returns and she is GONE! Good heavens, who can one rely on these days!
Also the WP is getting me a little ticked off lately. He shouldn't have become a priest if he found every little thing to be such a humongous moral issues. He can't seem to ever just do the right thing. He leaves the woman with her dead child for fear of a storm. Doesn't he have any faith that God will protect him, or in his will? This priest is a priest only in the smallest sense of the word. He is technically, but he never seems to act like one. And while I do feel bad for him, though not as much so as I did before, he is getting harder and harder to feel sympathy for. I guess that is because people usually find it easier to feel bad for a hero who errs morally, but the priest has proved quite oftne ot act out of what appears to be cowardice. Thus with each act made out of fear, and with everytime he flees, and endangers the life of other we find him harder to feel for. He is not our typical hero. I am interested to see if in the end he will come out to be one, and if so to what extent.
The priest is a terrible priest. When he ditches the woman on the plateau he is particularly unpriestly. It gets even more annoying when hes like i probably shouldnt have done that and then makes up some crazy rationale about tempting others to sin and decides to head back to the plateau but then the woman is gone so then he starts feeling guilty again. But then he eats the sugar cube, another stupid move that a good priest would not make. I wish he would just go along being the bad priest that he is and not keep feeling guilty about it. He is just a coward who is running from the authorities and is using religion as a reason to justify his irrational behavior.
My opinion of the priest is constantly changing. I think this is mostly because I really want to like him, but he's not giving me much reason to. He acts like the anti-priest, he takes advantage of people's hospitality, and although he mopes a lot did not take responsibility for anything until the past chapter. What really bugs me is that he, like Raskolnikov, does nice things, and then totally ruins them by saying something stupid. Like the scene a couple of chapters ago I just can't get out of my head when they took Miguel instead of him, and while he tried to get them to take him instead he does not admit to them who he truly is. While I was reading it I thought that I was wrong about him, and maybe he really is a good guy. And then he said something about how it's their fault: that it's his job to not get caught and their job to turn him in. He's already lost the town a member, he has to rub it in their face by blaming THEM for HIS presence? Then in these chapters he is a major jerk when he leaves the woman and steals the sugar cube, and then he confesses and repents. His character is seriously like a zigzag, when ever he does something nice he immediately follows it with something you would never expect a priest to do. So now I'm waiting for the next thing he does to hurt someone.
As the novel continues and the Whiskey Priest keeps making bad decisions mixed with good decisions and guilt, he seems to resemble Raskol. In addition to his struggles with helping and on many occasions hurting those around him, he seems to pass his guilt on to religion, like Raskol always seemed to blame his situation. I believe that we are meant to struggle with our opinions of the Priest and the many mistakes he makes create a more relatable image. In the future, however, it may be hard to trust a priest who stole candy from a baby.
I thought it was strange when the priest was sympathizing with the half-caste. But, he did sum up the priest rather nicely. "You do nothing in moderation. Either you run or you sit" (184). We have certainly seen two sides of the priest: the starving, rugged run-away, and the snotnose who bathes in luxury, both literally (in the stream scene) and through the wealth of the Catholic church.
The death of the murderer was pretty captivating. In his last moments, he treats the priest as a criminal, giving him a weapon instead of confessing his sins. (Although, I guess he was never planning to anyway...) This parallel casts the priest in a different light from the clean-shaven version that was introduced at the beginning of Part Three. He has slowly fallen from his "birthmarked" priesthood. He even seems to question God's judgment at one point: "Did she expect a miracle?...When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity" (155).
Whoa so much hatred for the priest! I usually find myself rooting for him, hoping he will continue to fight to stay alive. Anyway, I thought the scene when he is listening to confessions in the village (i forget the name, the one with the Lehrs--do we even know the name?) was very interesting. He barely even tried to give people inspiring advice or motivation, he just went through the motions of telling them to say Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and he kind of implied that sins such as adultery aren't really sins. And then all of a sudden, one woman droned on to him, and he just snapped. I really liked his speech to her about what loving God means to him. On page 173 he says, "It's wanting to protect Him from yourself." I thought that quote was really interesting, because he is basically saying he is not worthy of God's protection or love.
the power and the glory and crime and punishment are eerily similar, right down to the way their titles sound. I see many parallels between Rasko and the priest--they are not heroes, but not outright criminals despite what they've done. they're just confused and real. what I prefer about crime and punishment is that Dostoyevsky stirs controversy in you by rendering Rasko so intimately. It's hard to hate a character that's so flawed and realistic, like ourselves. Graham Greene does well too, but the priest is so impersonal, he doesn't even have a name. I think greene has done this to make the priest a representative character, a character that is completely symbolic of the state of religion itself during this time period. it's interesting that the priest keeps twisting religion to avoid responsibility for his actions, the same way Rasko did.
What i find most interesting about The Power and the Glory so far is that while Greene harshly critiques this godless society through descriptive motifs ( like the vultures, etc.) he is also critiquing religion, or the way it is warped by the clergy itself. he doesn't pick one side, which makes the novel a discovery rather than a lecture.
The scene when the priest steals the bone from that old dog is pretty depressing; what's up with all this animal cruelty in these past few books? (I can already see my essay prompt taking shape : compare and contrast C+P with P+G with respect to animal abuse...)
But yeah, i agree with everyone here that the priest sucks at being a good person/priest. I didn't know that priests charge for baptizing (or maybe he's just a bad person).
I'm still kinda torn because I can never tell what his deal is. He sometimes has thoughts of being a good person or experiences good emotions (regret, the want to help ppl, etc.) but then he just goes and does something mean. Weird.
I definitely agree that this section reminded me a lot of crime and punishment (again). At times, the priest tries so hard to survive, like when he takes the bone from the dog (p. 144-145). I feel like this also dehumanizes him by placing him on an equal level as a dog. It even says, "Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone"(144). Sometimes he tries so hard not get caught but then in chapter 4, he recklessly tells a random man with a gun that he's a priest; luckily, the man was not a policeman. Raskolnikov was similar. Sometimes, he would drive himself crazy with paranoia over not getting caught, for example when he discovers a tiny spot of blood on his sock and freaks out. But then at other times, he would accidentally almost confess, or do something reckless like visiting the old woman's apartment. Like Raskolnikov in C and P, I just feel like there's a circling and chase going on, and that capture is simply inevitable. The priest no longer sees hope (and even admires the hope in the dying dog), so it's hard for readers to do so. In chapter 1, part 3, he even goes back over the border even though he knows it's a trap.
I keep finding myself rooting for the priest, even though he keeps on proving to be more of a coward and less of an ideal religious figure. He's constantly trying to free himself of his sins, but in doing so, he just keeps on failing more and more. The main difference between him and Raskolnikov is that the priest feels so guilty for everything that he's done wrong. He's so hard on himself (rightly so, I guess), but in trying to make up for his actions, he just makes things worse. For example, he tries to help the woman with the dying son, which really is his job as a priest anyway, but he ends up abandoning her.
The Catholic religion has two strong sets of rules, the 10 commandments, of course, and the 7 deadly sins. The whiskey priest has broken one of the commandments, as he has stolen. He has also chastised himself for being idle at the Lehr’s place, and for falling into his old habits of drinking. These faults correspond to sloth and gluttony. He feels bad for doing nothing while others suffer where he left them, and he similarly feels bad for drinking and enjoying luxuries while others starve. It is true that he stole, but I believe that his thievery was justified; he was quite literally starving, and he stole food from a dying dog, emphasis on the word dying, and a dead child, emphasis on the word DEAD.
Yes, he has broken a few rules and committed some sins, but I honestly don’t blame him. If you were starving for days on end, I think you would enjoy some slothy living and drinks for a bit. He also is generous, the opposing heavenly virtue of greed, when he reduces his price of baptizing to one peso (and then later gives the money away). The priest then leaves, returning to the suffering, although it is of the gringo, because of the guilt he feels and responsibilities he feels he has. His time in Mexico served as a kind of limbo. The time before Mexico represents his time on earth, persecuted and chased, then limbo in Mexico, and then he makes his choice between continuing to the metaphorical heaven in Las Casas where he would enjoy freedom and returning to the place that now represents hell. (He doesn’t need money in hell…)
14 comments:
I really do not like the priest anymore. He is such a jerk. First, he leaves the woman at the plateau. Then, he feels so guilty that he goes back and finds she has left. He then eats the sugar cube that she has left for the child in case he wakes up. The reader hears the priest's thoughts: "He thought: I shouldn't have left her alone like that. God forgive me. I have no sense of responsibility: what can you expect from a whisky priest?" (p. 156).
Also, it bugged me that the priest charged when baptizing the children. "'One pest fifty' A voice from years back said firmly into his ear: they don't value what they don't pay for." (p. 167). Then he was feeling “generous” so he charged half a peso less. I mean I guess it was nice of him to drop his price. However, I felt that he should have be a little more considerate.
I really just don’t feel bad for the priest at all. He should feel guilty. I think that it is right for him to have that sense of shame. In this section, I found he felt the guiltiest, especially with the bath.
Also, the idea of abandonment resonates throughout this section. First, there is the abandoned town. Then, the priest abandons the woman and the child at the plateau. Then, he abandons the amount of money he is charging for the baptism.
Weren't we just supposed to have an essay prompt?
If so, here is mine:
Henry David Thoreau once stated in Walden "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor." Write a well organized essay comparing and contrasting characters of both Crime and Punishment and The Power and the Glory concerning the sagacity of the impoverished man in association with Thoreau's quote.
Before, I was musing about what the nameless priest representing the old ways and all that. Now it seems as if the priest’s flaws are becoming more evident or more extreme, and I have to wonder if this is still the case. Certainly, it would be impossible to state he represents some sort of nostalgic idealism of what a nation with religion was like. Perhaps his flaws are supposed to mirror what Greene saw to be the actual flaws of the Catholic Church. He does not focus enough on spiritual matters, but instead on worldly frivolities and decadences, which could represent the Catholic Church’s criticized over emphasis on ceremony. He is constantly berating himself for his behavior, so not even he thinks he, or the old ways, is perfect.
This overall decision to de-romanticize things is consistent throughout the book. The gringo, the outlaw in the story, could have easily fallen into the common archetype of the glamorized criminal. America, in particular, has a way of glamorizing famous criminals, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid. However, in the Power and the Glory, Greene portrays the real pain and devastation such behavior causes with the death of the child. Greene seems to want to strip away our preconceptions and show reality as best he can.
The priest was a sinful clergyman and he finally repents his guilty past in the middle of the novel. However, he is not regretful enough to completely change his ways yet. In Chapter 4, he still abandons the woman and the child although he should not have done so had he wanted to comensate for his wrongful actions.
Also, when he is asked to baptize the children he knows that he is too guilty to be a priest and perform such ceremonies but he agrees to baptize.
He is also happy that he is safe but such comfort makes him feel uneasy.
This is a series of not keeping to a single thought: doing something but regret doing in the next moment and feeling something but that emotion turning completely different in the next second; This mental schism or travelling back and forth between morality and selfishness resembels Raskolnikov completely.
The priest reminds me of Raskolnikov in another way. According to how we defined a hero in class when discussing the Hard Times, a hero is who undergoes some transformation. In the Power and the Glory, the priest goes through such change. The priest starts out being a complete coward in chapter 4 when he abandones the woman but in chapter 2 gains bravery. Before he was selfish and proud but he develops enough compassion to charge less for baptism and not to escape anymore but bless the dying gringo.
Raskolnikov who changes to a more loving and humble character in the second part had hints of those qualities in the first part. Also, the priest, before becoming more moral and courageous, appears to have conscience and potential humanity (he feels bad for the wrong actions).
First of all, WHERE DID CORAL GO! What happened to the whiskey priest's hideaway? What happened to morse code!? They had so many elaborate plans. I feel so let down and unhappy. After all of that he returns and she is GONE! Good heavens, who can one rely on these days!
Also the WP is getting me a little ticked off lately. He shouldn't have become a priest if he found every little thing to be such a humongous moral issues. He can't seem to ever just do the right thing. He leaves the woman with her dead child for fear of a storm. Doesn't he have any faith that God will protect him, or in his will? This priest is a priest only in the smallest sense of the word. He is technically, but he never seems to act like one. And while I do feel bad for him, though not as much so as I did before, he is getting harder and harder to feel sympathy for. I guess that is because people usually find it easier to feel bad for a hero who errs morally, but the priest has proved quite oftne ot act out of what appears to be cowardice. Thus with each act made out of fear, and with everytime he flees, and endangers the life of other we find him harder to feel for. He is not our typical hero. I am interested to see if in the end he will come out to be one, and if so to what extent.
The priest is a terrible priest. When he ditches the woman on the plateau he is particularly unpriestly. It gets even more annoying when hes like i probably shouldnt have done that and then makes up some crazy rationale about tempting others to sin and decides to head back to the plateau but then the woman is gone so then he starts feeling guilty again. But then he eats the sugar cube, another stupid move that a good priest would not make. I wish he would just go along being the bad priest that he is and not keep feeling guilty about it. He is just a coward who is running from the authorities and is using religion as a reason to justify his irrational behavior.
My opinion of the priest is constantly changing. I think this is mostly because I really want to like him, but he's not giving me much reason to. He acts like the anti-priest, he takes advantage of people's hospitality, and although he mopes a lot did not take responsibility for anything until the past chapter. What really bugs me is that he, like Raskolnikov, does nice things, and then totally ruins them by saying something stupid. Like the scene a couple of chapters ago I just can't get out of my head when they took Miguel instead of him, and while he tried to get them to take him instead he does not admit to them who he truly is. While I was reading it I thought that I was wrong about him, and maybe he really is a good guy. And then he said something about how it's their fault: that it's his job to not get caught and their job to turn him in. He's already lost the town a member, he has to rub it in their face by blaming THEM for HIS presence? Then in these chapters he is a major jerk when he leaves the woman and steals the sugar cube, and then he confesses and repents. His character is seriously like a zigzag, when ever he does something nice he immediately follows it with something you would never expect a priest to do. So now I'm waiting for the next thing he does to hurt someone.
As the novel continues and the Whiskey Priest keeps making bad decisions mixed with good decisions and guilt, he seems to resemble Raskol. In addition to his struggles with helping and on many occasions hurting those around him, he seems to pass his guilt on to religion, like Raskol always seemed to blame his situation. I believe that we are meant to struggle with our opinions of the Priest and the many mistakes he makes create a more relatable image. In the future, however, it may be hard to trust a priest who stole candy from a baby.
I thought it was strange when the priest was sympathizing with the half-caste. But, he did sum up the priest rather nicely. "You do nothing in moderation. Either you run or you sit" (184). We have certainly seen two sides of the priest: the starving, rugged run-away, and the snotnose who bathes in luxury, both literally (in the stream scene) and through the wealth of the Catholic church.
The death of the murderer was pretty captivating. In his last moments, he treats the priest as a criminal, giving him a weapon instead of confessing his sins. (Although, I guess he was never planning to anyway...) This parallel casts the priest in a different light from the clean-shaven version that was introduced at the beginning of Part Three. He has slowly fallen from his "birthmarked" priesthood. He even seems to question God's judgment at one point: "Did she expect a miracle?...When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity" (155).
Whoa so much hatred for the priest! I usually find myself rooting for him, hoping he will continue to fight to stay alive. Anyway, I thought the scene when he is listening to confessions in the village (i forget the name, the one with the Lehrs--do we even know the name?) was very interesting. He barely even tried to give people inspiring advice or motivation, he just went through the motions of telling them to say Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and he kind of implied that sins such as adultery aren't really sins. And then all of a sudden, one woman droned on to him, and he just snapped. I really liked his speech to her about what loving God means to him. On page 173 he says, "It's wanting to protect Him from yourself." I thought that quote was really interesting, because he is basically saying he is not worthy of God's protection or love.
the power and the glory and crime and punishment are eerily similar, right down to the way their titles sound. I see many parallels between Rasko and the priest--they are not heroes, but not outright criminals despite what they've done. they're just confused and real. what I prefer about crime and punishment is that Dostoyevsky stirs controversy in you by rendering Rasko so intimately. It's hard to hate a character that's so flawed and realistic, like ourselves. Graham Greene does well too, but the priest is so impersonal, he doesn't even have a name. I think greene has done this to make the priest a representative character, a character that is completely symbolic of the state of religion itself during this time period. it's interesting that the priest keeps twisting religion to avoid responsibility for his actions, the same way Rasko did.
What i find most interesting about The Power and the Glory so far is that while Greene harshly critiques this godless society through descriptive motifs ( like the vultures, etc.) he is also critiquing religion, or the way it is warped by the clergy itself. he doesn't pick one side, which makes the novel a discovery rather than a lecture.
The scene when the priest steals the bone from that old dog is pretty depressing; what's up with all this animal cruelty in these past few books? (I can already see my essay prompt taking shape : compare and contrast C+P with P+G with respect to animal abuse...)
But yeah, i agree with everyone here that the priest sucks at being a good person/priest. I didn't know that priests charge for baptizing (or maybe he's just a bad person).
I'm still kinda torn because I can never tell what his deal is. He sometimes has thoughts of being a good person or experiences good emotions (regret, the want to help ppl, etc.) but then he just goes and does something mean. Weird.
I definitely agree that this section reminded me a lot of crime and punishment (again). At times, the priest tries so hard to survive, like when he takes the bone from the dog (p. 144-145). I feel like this also dehumanizes him by placing him on an equal level as a dog. It even says, "Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone"(144). Sometimes he tries so hard not get caught but then in chapter 4, he recklessly tells a random man with a gun that he's a priest; luckily, the man was not a policeman. Raskolnikov was similar. Sometimes, he would drive himself crazy with paranoia over not getting caught, for example when he discovers a tiny spot of blood on his sock and freaks out. But then at other times, he would accidentally almost confess, or do something reckless like visiting the old woman's apartment. Like Raskolnikov in C and P, I just feel like there's a circling and chase going on, and that capture is simply inevitable. The priest no longer sees hope (and even admires the hope in the dying dog), so it's hard for readers to do so. In chapter 1, part 3, he even goes back over the border even though he knows it's a trap.
I keep finding myself rooting for the priest, even though he keeps on proving to be more of a coward and less of an ideal religious figure. He's constantly trying to free himself of his sins, but in doing so, he just keeps on failing more and more. The main difference between him and Raskolnikov is that the priest feels so guilty for everything that he's done wrong. He's so hard on himself (rightly so, I guess), but in trying to make up for his actions, he just makes things worse. For example, he tries to help the woman with the dying son, which really is his job as a priest anyway, but he ends up abandoning her.
The Catholic religion has two strong sets of rules, the 10 commandments, of course, and the 7 deadly sins. The whiskey priest has broken one of the commandments, as he has stolen. He has also chastised himself for being idle at the Lehr’s place, and for falling into his old habits of drinking. These faults correspond to sloth and gluttony. He feels bad for doing nothing while others suffer where he left them, and he similarly feels bad for drinking and enjoying luxuries while others starve. It is true that he stole, but I believe that his thievery was justified; he was quite literally starving, and he stole food from a dying dog, emphasis on the word dying, and a dead child, emphasis on the word DEAD.
Yes, he has broken a few rules and committed some sins, but I honestly don’t blame him. If you were starving for days on end, I think you would enjoy some slothy living and drinks for a bit. He also is generous, the opposing heavenly virtue of greed, when he reduces his price of baptizing to one peso (and then later gives the money away). The priest then leaves, returning to the suffering, although it is of the gringo, because of the guilt he feels and responsibilities he feels he has. His time in Mexico served as a kind of limbo. The time before Mexico represents his time on earth, persecuted and chased, then limbo in Mexico, and then he makes his choice between continuing to the metaphorical heaven in Las Casas where he would enjoy freedom and returning to the place that now represents hell. (He doesn’t need money in hell…)
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