The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Published 1940 · 221 pages · 76,788 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Power and the Glory to read?

The Power and the Glory scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Greene writes in controlled, evocative prose that captures the vocabulary of Mexican anti-clericalism and Catholic guilt. The language is accessible while conveying the specific textures of a country persecuting its church.
Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
Sentences are often spare and morally weighted, building through accumulated observation of the whisky priest's flight. Greene's prose has the precision of someone writing about grace and sin with equal attention.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
The novel explores sanctity, failure, and whether God can work through flawed vessels through a sinful priest who cannot stop being a priest. His weakness becomes the occasion for examining what priesthood means beyond worthiness.
Information density: 52 out of 100
1930s Mexico during the religious persecution, Catholic sacramental theology, and the textures of a society hunting its clergy layer through the narrative. Greene builds his drama through accumulated attention to confession, mass, and the rituals the state wants to destroy.
Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
The whisky priest's perspective dominates, revealing his self-knowledge and self-condemnation. The reader must interpret his sanctity through his failures, understanding what God might see that he cannot.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
The whisky becomes symbolic of the priest's weakness that doesn't cancel his priesthood. The daughter becomes symbolic of the fruit of his sin. The lieutenant becomes symbolic of secular conviction that hunts what it cannot understand.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Greene maintains complex proximity to his priest's torment, neither excusing his sins nor dismissing his holiness. The novel is Catholic about grace while honest about human failure.
Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
The priest dies having fulfilled his vocation despite himself. Greene offers the martyrdom without claiming to know whether the priest achieved salvation, leaving that judgment to God.
Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
The novel follows the priest's flight with interspersed perspectives on those who hunt him. The structure is accessible, building through the chase toward its theological climax.

How The Power and the Glory is regarded

The Power and the Glory holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Power and the Glory sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (144 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Power and the Glory scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
He was a bad priest, he knew it: they had a word for his kind-a whisky priest-but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind
Symbol: Formal
He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years.
Mythos: Tragic Irony iv (irony iv)
Death was not the end of pain-to believe in peace was a kind of heresy.
Genre: Novel + Romance
'Young Juan,' the mother read, 'from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety.

Where the story of The Power and the Glory takes place

  • Anticlerical Tabasco-like Mexican state, 1930s (1930 to 1936), the main setting

6 things that are true of The Power and the Glory, with the passage for each

  1. The customs officer waiting for his false teeth has had every tooth pulled by Mr. Tench.

    Mr. Tench had removed them all.

  2. Coral Fellows is educated by correspondence school, with answers marked by post from London.

    signed with a rubber stamp Henry Beckley, B.A., Director of Private Tutorials, Ltd.

  3. The priest has a daughter.

    I have a child, the priest said, if that's what you mean.

  4. The lieutenant gives the captured priest five pesos and lets him go.

    He put his hand suddenly in his pocket and pulled out a five-peso piece.

  5. Starving, the priest fights a crippled dog for a bone and eats the raw meat himself.

    The priest tore off some of the raw meat with his teeth and began to chew

  6. The novel ends with another priest arriving at the door of the family that has just heard the old one was shot.

    and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy: I am a priest.

Scenes in The Power and the Glory that Frye would name

37 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
The crash of the rifles shook Mr. Tench The priest's execution is seen from the dentist's window, a sacrificial death reduced to routine.
Eiron, untitled
I am a whisky priest. The priest self-deprecates before his fellow prisoners and so undermines their image of him as a martyr.
Anagnorisis, untitled
He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted-to be a saint. The final recognition of the book, on the morning of his death.
Agon, untitled
I don't know, the child said. The lieutenant caught his breath. The village interrogation puts the hunter face to face with the hunted, and the child's answer decides the contest.
Displacement, untitled
Christ would not have found Judas sleeping in the garden: Judas could watch more than one hour. The mestizo's pursuit is a Gethsemane betrayal pattern in realistic costume.
Katabasis, untitled
An appalling smell lay on the air and somebody in the absolute darkness wept. The descent into the crowded black cell, a hell that is also a human community.

Books that share these scenes with The Power and the Glory

About the author

Graham Greene