The purpose of this research is to examine The Heart of the Matter and Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene. The plan of the research will be to set forth the outlines of narrative action in the two novels, and then to discuss by means of comparison the treatment of West Africa in the two books.
Journey Without Maps is a travelogue that is constructed in the manner of a personal memoir. The through line of action of the book is an account of Greene's six-week walking tour of the jungles of Sierra Leone, French Guinea, and Liberia, from the cities of Freetown in Sierra Leone to Grand Bassa in Liberia. Undertaken in the early 1930s, the journey is a literal description of what was then virtually unmapped geographical territory in European West Africa. Greene was accompanied by his cousin and by a group of native bearers or carriers, tribesmen hired for the purpose of conveying food, supplies, and, as necessary, the white travelers along the trek. Greene describes his journey in more or less linear fashion, from the time of the boat trip from England to Freetown, through the final days in Monrovia as he awaited another boat to take him back to England.
But the linear narrative is punctuated by remembrances of his travel and work in Europe in early adulthood, an important feature of Journey Without Maps for the reason that Greene's observations in Africa provide occasion for him to comment on his life prior to embarking for Africa and vice versa. Such observations become the thematic core of the book, which has as its manifest subject the travelogue and as its latent subject a commentary on human nature and behavior, to which he says he hopes to come closer having deliberately sought an adventure
wholly outside the scope of ordinary life experience. The connections he makes are resolutions of his speculations, and they impinge on his judgment of his society, of Africa, and of human nature more generally, but always as ...