The Heart of the Matter 501Polish post office; he stands by as Russian soldiers
kill Alfred Matzerath; he watches Corporal Lankes
senselessly murder a group of nuns, and he looks on
as Roswitha Raguna is hit by a stray shell during an
Allied attack.
Oskar also relates numerous cases of violence
against women. Herbert Truczinski is killed in his
attempt to sexually assault the figure of Niobe in
the Danzig Maritime Museum. Oskar witnesses
the rape of Lina Greff by Russian soldiers, attest-
ing to the prevalence of sexual violence in situations
of war. In the postwar years, Lankes repeatedly
beats his girlfriend, Ulla, and later, on his trip with
Oskar to Normandy, sexually assaults a nun. Oskar’s
alleged sexual encounter with Sister Dorothea, who
is later found murdered, can also be interpreted as
an assault.
While Oskar is often a witness to violent events,
he is more than simply an innocent bystander.
Although he insists on his innocence in the case
of Sister Dorothea, he may well be her murderer.
Spurned by Maria, he physically assaults her after he
learns of her affair with Alfred Matzerath and sub-
sequently tries to abort her pregnancy by causing her
to fall from a ladder. Later, he plans to stab her in the
belly with a pair of scissors, but is prevented when
Maria notices his intentions. During the war, Oskar
becomes the leader of the Dusters and although he
claims not to participate in their attacks on their
rivals, he accepts their activities. As a child, Oskar
exhibits a violent temper, especially when anyone
threatens to take away his tin drum. He responds by
shattering glass with his voice, an act that is reminis-
cent of landlord Zeidler’s violent fits of rage or the
violence and destruction of Kristallnacht.
Toward the end of the novel, Oskar witnesses an
attack on Victor Weluhn, carried out by three men
who claim to be fulfilling an execution order issued
in 1939 for Victor’s involvement in the defense of
the Polish post office. Although the war is long over,
the men insist on carrying out this former obliga-
tion. Here Grass satirizes misplaced notions of duty
and order. Throughout the novel, countless acts of
private and public violence attest to the potential
for savagery that underlies apparently well-ordered
society.
Christina Kraenzle
grEEnE, graHam The Heart of the
Matter (1948)
The Heart of the Matter is one of 20th-century Brit-
ish Catholic writer Graham Greene’s most widely
considered to be masterpieces. It concerns the
efforts of police officer Henry Scobie to lead a just
life amid suffering, corruption, and temptation at an
unidentified British colony in Africa during World
War II. Over the course of the novel, Scobie suffers
a gradual descent from justice, a descent motivated
by pity and pride. Because he pities a Portuguese
ship captain, Scobie destroys a letter that he should
have reported to the commissioner; because he pities
his emotionally crippled wife, Louise, he sends her
to South Africa with the proceeds of a compromis-
ing loan from a black marketeer named Yusef; and
because he pities shipwreck survivor Helen Rolt, he
begins an affair with her. In an effort to maintain the
reputation his devotion to justice has earned him, he
hides his affair and his connection with Yusef, to the
point that he allows the murder of possibly the only
person he truly loves, his young servant Ali. Unable
to bear his fall from grace, he commits suicide by
overdosing on a heart medicine.
Though Greene himself considered it a failure,
the novel has been admired for its rich evocation of
the self-defeating conflicts that attend the human
search for a code to live by.
Scott DanielFutility in The Heart of the Matter
The sense of the futility of all human endeavor per-
vades Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. The
novel’s closing implies a static future as effectively
as its opening conveys the sense of an unchanging
past, so that the story itself, chronicling Scobie’s
misguidedly heroic efforts to help others, is the story
of change imploding, collapsing upon itself, quashed
by the very forces it sets in motion.
The stability of Henry Scobie’s situation—epito-
mized by his being passed over for a position that
he is, by all appearances, eminently qualified for:
commissioner—rests upon a distorted stoicism that
is in a sense inaction or indifference disguised as
justice. While faultlessly performing his duties as
public servant, Scobie wallows in futility, glutton-
ously savoring his lack of advancement, Louise’s