Representation of Kierkegaard's Aesthetic Stage in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock
Abstract
This study argues that the anti-hero Pinkie in Graham Greene’s first overtly religious novel Brighton Rock (1938) echoes Danish existentialist Kierkegaard’s aesthetic way of life, devoid of ideal and courage. Being the first phase in Kierkegaard’s three-fold existential ladder (theory of stages) into the fully authentic identity, the aesthetic stage carries in itself the seeds of a fulfilled selfhood. As such, with its plots and themes, Brighton Rock experiments with the capacity of such an aesthetic life to form an authentic selfhood through the main character Pinkie Brown. Yet, this experimentation fails due to Pinkie’s living in absolute proximity to good and evil and his latent desire to experience them at the same time. His distorted view of religion and strong imagination of physical hell creates a cataclysmic force that eradicates himself though he desperately seeks for a pristine experience of his selfhood. Greene figuratively annuls this life-project by clearly demarcating it from a ‘strange’ operation of God’s will. In the end, Pinkie as the embodiment of non-existing individual with his melancholy, anxiety, and despair progresses from purely destructive aesthetic categories of sensuousness to alleviating reflection which, in the end, enables him to make a ‘leap of faith’ that will carry him to a more elevated existence type.
Keywords
Greene,Kierkegaard,Stages,Aesthetic,Brighton Rock,Existentialism
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