39 pages • 1 hour read
Graham GreeneThe Heart of the Matter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 2, Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2, Part 1 Summary
Standing on the veranda of the District Commissioner’s bungalow, Scobie waits for the group of survivors at Pende. Realizing that one of the victims could easily have been Louise, Scobie remarks to Wilson that Louise arrived in South Africa safely. Wilson interrogates Scobie about how Tallit got caught smuggling illegal diamonds. Scobie says he received a tip about the parrot, but Tallit’s cousin claims the parrots were switched.
The next morning, Scobie watches the stretchers pass by carrying the victims and struggles to reconcile these deathly images with the love of God. He also cannot believe in a “God who was not human enough to love what he had created” (108). One of the survivors, Scobie learns, is a 19-year-old widow who is grasping a stamp-album. Scobie reflects on how she was carried into his life on a stretcher. The doctor informs Scobie that he is unsure of her fate.
The wife of a local missionary named Mrs. Bowles asks Scobie to stay at the rest-house with the patients while she runs to the dispensary. Full of pity, Scobie prays for a young girl who, in Scobie’s imagination, appears to have a white communion veil over her head. Suddenly, the sickly girl awakens and calls him “Father” (112). Scobie allows the girl to think he is her father and consoles her by making rabbit shadows with his fingers on the pillow. Moving the rabbit’s ears up and down and tasting sweat in his mouth, Scobie is taken aback by Mrs. Bowles who appears suddenly behind him. She tells him to stop because the child is dead.
The next day, Scobie can’t bring himself to attend the child’s funeral, but he visits the young widow, Mrs. Helen Rolt, instead. He reads A Bishop among the Bantus to a young boy who is in the room with Mrs. Rolt. Scobie is surprised that Mrs. Rolt is awake and listening to him read. Feeling pity for her, Scobie looks through her stamp-album and reads the inscription addressed to Helen from her father.
Book 2, Part 1 Analysis
Scobie’s situation becomes increasingly precarious in Book 2. He is now embroiled in several layers of plot complications which are equally romantic, criminal, and spiritual. His nascent relationship with Helen Rolt threatens to further cast Scobie in a sea of lies. But Scobie’s lack of self-awareness makes him ill-equipped to traverse these waters. Wilson astutely senses this, reflecting in a monologue that “Scobie was still a novice in the world of deceit” (155).
Deceit pervades The Heart of the Matter as a plot device and a thematic concern. Scobie feels a visceral antagonism to not telling the truth, a trait that is perhaps emblematic of a police officer. Yet Scobie lies regularly, rationalizing his dishonesty to the point of complete self-denial. When questioned by Colonel Wright over the Tallit affair and Scobie’s illicit dealings with Yusef, Scobie reflects that “he felt an odd relief that he had not yet been called upon to lie” (132). This is not true, as Scobie lies about taking money from Yusef. But Scobie is so steeped in feelings of pity and responsibility that he subconsciously rationalizes his dishonesty as duty.
In part, Scobie’s abandonment of the truth stems from his perceived lack of truth and justice in the British colonies. He reflects that in British West Africa, unlike in Europe, there is no “speculative line between the truth and the lies” (128). The process of uncovering the truth is compared to spiritual and physical torture, waking “in some men a virulent hatred” (128). This psycho-physical breakdown is less a result of the “exotic” colonial settings as in Heart of Darkness, and more a product of a profound moral crisis.
Scobie begins to feel a “strange unreality in his own words” (138). This sense of dislocation should be situated within Scobie’s spiritual questioning that unfolds concurrently with his criminal and romantic plot entanglements. The moral crisis that Scobie experiences is a consequence of his struggle with Catholicism. Scobie confesses to Father Rank, “I feel—tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but […] I’m not sure that I even believe” (140). In part, Scobie struggles to reconcile the question of theodicy, or the vindication of God’s all-powerful goodness amid the existence of evil. Crucially, Scobie doesn’t renounce God, he simply questions his inherited idea of God. Observing the shipwreck victims being stretchered away, Scobie says that “he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created” (108). However, Scobie allowing the dead child to call him Father further illustrates Scobie’s crisis of faith and possible prophetic delusions. In fact, Scobie laments that “God was too accessible” (141), which evokes questions of belief versus doctrine, Scobie’s capacity for self-deception and paternalism, and his conflating of love and pity.
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