<P> Whatever Greene's writings and personal feelings toward the story (he hated it and idly suggests that an earlier, failed piece whose place was given to The Heart of the Matter may well have been a better work), the themes of failure are threaded strongly throughout . Each character in the novel, be it Scobie or Wilson, fails in their ultimate goals by the end of the book . Scobie's ultimate sacrifice, suicide, fails to bring the expected happiness he imagines it will to his wife and despite the fact that he tries to conceal the secret of his infidelity with that ultimate sin, the reader discovers that his wife had known all along . </P> <P> Similarly, Wilson, the man who is pursuing an adulterous affair with Scobie's wife, an affair she refuses to participate in, is foiled at the end of the novel when Scobie's wife refuses to give in to his advances even after Scobie's death . Other instances of failure, both subtler and more obvious, can be seen throughout the work, lending it a muted, dark feeling . </P> <P> The Heart of the Matter is not just about failure, but about the price we all pay for our individualism and the impossibility of truly understanding another person . Each of the characters in the novel operates at tangential purposes which they often think are clear to others, or think are hidden from others, but are in fact not . </P> <P> As in many of Greene's earlier works this book deals with not just the tension of the individual and the state, but also the conflict of the individual and the church . Scobie throughout the book constantly puts his fears in the voice and context of religion . After his wife returns he has a pathological fear of taking communion while suffering the stain of mortal sin and later agonises over the choice of suicide in terms of its theological damnation . The conflict is particularly interesting because it is not a conflict of faith, but rather a dispute set in legalistic terms: whether a violation of the laws of faith is justified by the personal sense of duty the character feels; which duty, personal or theological, is in the end primary; and what happens when those laws are broken . This argument is not simply one of whether Scobie is damned to hell, a question Greene himself tired of, but rather of whether what he did was worth anything in the world of the present . </P>

The heart of the matter graham greene summary pdf