Reflection on the Power and the Glory: Exploring Existentialism

All great people in the world are great because they believe in what they do; they have such strong conviction. When a person has no conviction, what is their purpose here on planet Earth? They abuse the precious life that they were given without leaving their mark as a human. Even if a person has a belief in a bad thing, they are still living for something. A twisted human soul appears very ironic for us, yet seems so common in the novel The Power and the Glory. Every single character in this novel has different perspectives of how they should live their lives, whether it be for a good reason, for the wrong reason, or to feel nothing at all. Conviction gives us the answer to the question, "Why am I here?" and without it, that question will remain unanswered and worthless.

A typical priest is married to the church, devoted to their religion and beliefs and convictions. For a priest to have a marriage outside of the church, not only would it be frowned upon, but strictly forbidden. The irony in this novel is so strong that the priest—one with no recognized name symbolizing nothingness—is an alcoholic attempting to feel nothing in his life. He breaks the regulation a priest should have by having a short relationship with a woman named Maria. The outcome of this was failure for the priest to obey rules as well as a baby girl named Brigitta. A man like this in our society who has so many flaws would be shunned and have awful prejudice thoughts towards him. People would think of him as nothing just like he thinks of himself, worthless. Asking himself, "Why am I here?" gives him some direction in his life, yet always refrains from asking the question and revert back to his old ways.

Children should obtain innocence, however, Brigitta seems stoic and like an adult in a child’s body, which is the exact opposite of children today—a child who portrays emotion and utilizes their innocence. She doesn’t get along with other children for the reason that she grew up so quickly and her family wasn’t like her peers’ families with both a mother and a father. Brigitta, like her alcoholic father, has no value to her life. With her dark, twisted personality, you wouldn’t expect her to do an act of kindness since she seems like she believes in nothing, yet she saves her father from being arrested and found by the police. If the priest hadn’t encountered Maria, Brigitta would be a normal child, but his neglect to follow rules as a priest led her to be an outcast, a nobody, nothing at all.

Very comparable to the Mechanical Hound in the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Mr. Tench has no human soul; there is nothing that he, himself, believes in, so he just goes along with any conventions that appear in his life. Along without obtaining any conviction, he takes orders as if he were a robot. “Good God, one ought to do something… Of course there was nothing to do.” (216) The thoughts of this man are also structured and robotic, like his actions. He thinks that he needs to do something when there is something to do, but needs to be told to do it. Until he learns to do things on his own, he will never truly have conviction for anything or have a purpose to his life. When asking himself, “Why am I here?”, he wouldn’t know the answer and would need direction to answer it correctly, to get a task done the way someone else wants to, to see nothing through his own eyes.

One of the most hopeful characters in the novel would be Coral Fellows who has such motherly behavior, even more motherly than her own mother. This young, thirteen-year-old girl unlike some of the characters in the novel has a strong conviction that she truly believes in, and unlike most of the characters, it’s for a good purpose: to help. All she wants to do is help and assist others in what they do. She lends out a helping hand when the whiskey priest comes along and is willing to help him even though her parents are not. At a point in the novel, Coral is the priest’s only hope, the only one who accepts him and protects him, the only one who gives the slightest care to his messed up life, the only one willing to understand what he has gone through. Without characters like Coral, this novel would have absolutely no happiness.

Conviction: a fixed or firm belief. Nearly all people in the world have conviction for one thing or another, yet many characters in The Power and the Glory aren’t supposed to be worth anything and literally symbolize nothing in the words written on the pages of this novel. These characters choose not to believe in anything. They choose not to. All of these characters purposely exclude feelings from their lives. Many of them do not want to answer the existential questions that come along. Rather than living for something, for a goal of some sort, to believe in anything, they live to do nothing, aspire to do nothing, to believe in nothing, to be nothing themselves.