ABSTRACT
The close comparison between Graham Greene and Soren Kierkegaard allows her to make a strong argument for the case that if Greene is a "Catholic novelist," he is far from hewing to the traditional dogmatic line. Anne T. Salvatore links "redeemed irony" with Kierkegaard's idea of faith as a kind of repetition, repetition being the quintessential movement of the ethical/spiritual life, and shows that it is the narrow gate. Try to draw an end to this series—Greene and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Shakespeare, Kafka and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Cervantes, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Kant, and so on. But this is not just a problem of physics. Kierkegaard clearly, and, if Salvatore's thesis is correct, Greene as well, recognizes this infinite divisibility of matter as the source of a moral problem. Imagination has more ways of escape than a novelist can dream of—philosophy is one of them, literary criticism another.
