With this story, Greene tries to show us that the soul can really live on beyond death, even though the story is not meant to be taken seriously. Greene presents the soul as immortal, being far stronger than our fragile bodies on this earth.
In another horror story of Greene’s “A Little Place of the Edgware Road”, Greene tells us about Craven, who has a recurrent dream. In his nightmare, bodies did not rot after death, and walked in and out of each other’s graves through an underground connection. He viewed the human body as being corrupted and diseased full of “warts and boils and eruptions”. One day, he goes to the cinema, where a man starts talking rubbish next to him. By his words and “damp and sticky” hand, Craven thought that he was a murderer who was recently featured in the news. When the strange man leaves a smear of blood on his hand, Craven leaves and phones the police, who tell him that the murderer had already been caught. After being told that the victim’s body couldn’t be found, Craven remembered the man’s “damp breath”, and looking into the mirror saw “tiny drops of blood” on his face. The truth finally dawns on Craven and he realises that the man in the cinema was actually the dead victim and not the murderer. At that point, Craven goes crazy, and screams, “I won’t go mad. I won’t go mad. I’m sane. I won’t go mad.”
Again in this story, Greene tells us of how the soul lives on even when the body dies. An element of insanity and obsession is strongly felt throughout the story.
In the story “A second Death”, Greene again plays with the idea of afterlife, by twisting around a story from the Bible. In the story we are told how an old woman kept her thirty-year old son under her surveillance at all times. Now he is dying, and she goes to the dying man’s friend, to ask him to visit her son for the last time. The friend is sceptical about his dying friend as he usually led a promiscuous life. The doctor realises that the dying man is scared of something, and this is because the man knows that he will die a sinner. His fear is further felt when he says that he had already died before and that it was a terrible experience. After arising from the death, he tried to lead a good life for a couple of years, but succumbed to his old ways. While being reassured by his friend, the man dies.
This story mostly deals with fear of death, as the man, which we later learn is Lazarus, had already died before, and didn’t want to go through the same terrifying experience. Greene again brings out the idea of the afterlife, and toys with it. The story also has a strong element of religion in it, partly because it is based on the story from the Bible. For the first time in his stories, Greene brings out a guilt feeling in his character before he passes away, suggesting that he felt remorse for leading the sinful life he led.
As seen from these stories, death was something that Greene was not sure about. He had mixed feelings about the afterlife, and didn’t know whether it really existed or not. An element of disgust and rot is associated to the body with these stories, especially in “A Little Place of the Edgware Road”. Greene also seems to make fun of death, and in the story “A second Death”, he says that there is nothing solemn about death. Death is almost seen as only a phase of life.
