Children’s Psychology in Graham Greene’s Short Fiction Ковина Алёна Витальевна Студентка Санкт-Петербургского Государственного Университета, Санкт-Петербург, Россия

Graham Greene is one of the most prolific and widely read English writers of the 20th century. He is famous for his novels, covering political and social issues of the time and sarcastic short stories. However, another part of ‘Greeneland’ ignored by critics: is his gripping stories of children suffering from the world around. This research is aimed at investigating the peculiarities of children’s psychology in the context of Graham Greene’s short stories and against the background of other texts. The first story to analyze is “I Spy”. The main principles are stylistic dichotomy and epiphany. In the first part of the story, we see Charlie Stowe, a 12year old immature boy. From the psychological point of view Charlie is a mother-oriented child, who possesses the Oedipus complex.[Petocz: 151] This is conveyed through the line “her noisy charity filled the world for him”. [Greene: 167] The second part begins with an epiphanic episode, expressed in the title; a homophone to the children’s game “Eye spy”, playing which you must unexpectedly open your eyes. The boy suddenly realised that while his mum was ‘boisterous and kindly, his father was very like himself, doing things in the dark’.[Greene: 169] At this very moment of epiphany he loses his innocence and eradicates his flaw. This is the only story where the loss of innocence is seen as a natural process. In two other stories “The innocent” and “Under the garden” there is a strong feeling of regret that childhood is gone. Both stories are written in a form of a journey where grown-up characters return to the place of their childhood. The main incongruity of “The innocent” is between the narrator’s present adulthood and past childhood. The dichotomy is expressed in the attitude towards love. The hero’s childhood was full of pure feeling, ‘I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone’-he says. But now, when he is ‘happy about a girl’ he can ‘simply go and buy the other one’. [Greene: 102] A revelation comes to him when he finds an obscene picture of a naked man and woman he drew a long time ago. Later on he realises that ‘it is only now after so many years of life that the picture seemed obscene’. [Greene: 105] “Under the Garden” is another example where innocence remains somewhere deep inside a grown-up man. The main literary device here is the dichotomous interplay between the hero’s conscious adult life and subconscious childhood dreams. Greene triples the narrator in order to show this difference in reality perception. From the third person narrator it changes to the first person singular and the second part is told by William Wildich, an old grown-up man who managed to preserve the best part of innocence inside. The childhood memories of William and his brother differ significantly and it actually seems that the latter has never been a child at all. The third narrator of the story is also William but here he is a small child who tells us of his adventure under the garden, which with its wonders, ridiculous heroes, timelessness and paradoxes is the allusion to Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”.[Miller: 156] Greene creates new reality and his character says “I learned from Javitt - this man who never existed- more than from my schoolmasters.[Greene: 215] This story communicates that sometimes, when one is able to dream, the better part of innocence may survive. Nevertheless, among Greene’s stories there is one which stands out in its unusual perception of childhood. “The destructors” works on several levels of meaning as both a parable and allegory. [Miller: 153] The psychologists would say the destruction of the Old Misery’s house by the gang is the example of children being intoxicated by the collective desire to destroy.[Фромм: 537] In a political sense the story is an allegory to the fruits of leadership. All the children blindly follow the idea which benefits only the leader. However, on the third level of meaning this story represents the loss of the work of art, or, more generally, the loss of entire culture, as the house had been designed by Christopher Wren. Children, driven by wanton destructiveness, which a new generation always possesses, are the products of WWII and for them that house “stands like one sound tooth in a rotten mouth”.[Miller: 153, 154] For Greene childhood is the time always marked by intolerable sufferings caused by the incomprehension of the surroundings. In “The End of the Party” the two twins, Peter and Francis, fail to struggle alone against the adult world around them. The key words to the story are ‘the barrier of ignorance’ which children fail to break through. [Greene: 187] The brightest representative of the adult world is Mrs Henne-Falcon, whose surname is an oxymoron. On the one hand she is kind and caring like a mother hen.. The author draws our attention to her “exuberant breasts” and “enormous bulk”. On the other hand she has got “mustering and impatient eyes”. [Greene: 185] In this story Greene surrounds the twins with predators who drive them into traps, which ultimately results in Francis’s death. Peter loses his love, he is made incomplete and forced to lose his innocence and assume his brother’s fears. According to Greene childhood is the only stage of life, which allows us to dream and love purely., however it is always accompanied by parental incomprehension. Greene’s stories suggest that childhood is more valuable in many ways than adulthood, which he thinks to be the shelter of cruelty and spiritual paralysis. Литература

1. Graham Greene. Complete Short Stories. Penguin Classics, 2005 2. Miller H. Understanding Graham Greene. University of South Carolina, 1990 3. Petocz A.. Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism. Cambridge University Press, 2003 4. Фромм Э. Анатомия человеческой деструктивности. АСТ, 2004