The transforming power of places: the impact of the spatial setting on characters in Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter

The English novelist Graham Greene kept a journal for most of his life, except when it might threaten his safety.1 There he captured both mundane as well as extraordinary or otherwise noteworthy moments as a reminder in case he may one day run out of ideas for his fiction. As it happened, however, during his wartime service in African Sierra Leone, the danger of keeping any personal records could have posed too great a threat to himself and his professional interests that, as he came to regret some years later, he had to rely on his memory in order to put together scattered shreds of memories of this particular time of his life which became the main source for one of his masterpieces, the 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. In it he captures the paradoxical situation of Europeans who for professional reasons inhabit these distant and alien corners of the Earth. There he places the protagonist, Major Scobie, and others in order to construe a drama of as common life as we know it, only spiced up by the African setting as a dislocating element, a background for the kaleidoscope of human problems that are correspondingly tinted by the tropical heat. It is the purpose of this paper to show the workings of the spatial setting as an inseparable part of the novel as well as its inevitable impact on the characters...