Blog #7, "Across the Bridge," by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s story is a great short story model to analyze because of the quickly moving plot and the use of rapid character development. Greene’s plot continues to evolve throughout the whole story, and is constantly building tension. At the beginning of the piece, when the narrator first introduces “Mr. Calloway,” the reader is informed that he is “worth a million.” The reader then quickly finds out that Mr. Calloway made his million through committing fraud. This detail unveils a whole other side to Mr. Calloway’s character. We then see him described as, “an elderly man who kicked his dog and swindled the poor.” The tension in the plot increases when the detectives come to find Mr. Calloway in the town. The entire plot is filled with irony. When the “detectives” come to the Mexican border town to try and find Mr. Calloway, they cannot find him, even though he is the only non-Mexican in the entire town. The detectives can be seen as an imitation of the types of people that exist in our modern society. They are wandering around, constantly bumping into and having casual conversations with the man that they are supposed to arrest. The part of the story that I really admire is how Greene relieves the tension in the ending, “the dog started across the road right in front of the car, and Mr. Calloway yelled, at the dog or the car, I don’t know which. Anyway, the detective swerved – he said later, weakly, at the enquiry that he couldn’t run over a dog, and down went Mr. Calloway, in a mess of broken glass and gold rims and silver hair, and blood.” Through having the detectives accidently kill the man they had been looking for all along, it gives the death a comical outlook, which is curiously satisfying for the reader.

The other quality that I liked about Greene’s piece was the use of rapid character development. The piece is not very long, however it is filled with details that are constantly revealing traits about the characters, most specifically, Mr. Calloway. I tried to input this trait into my short fiction piece, because it causes the reader to become attached and understand the character of the story more clearly. We are shown three different perspectives of Mr. Calloway within the story. These perspectives are the narrator’s, “an elderly man who kicked his dog and swindled the poor,” the people of the Mexican border town, “they respected him too much to talk to him – he was worth a million” and the detective’s who could never identify him. Through reading these different perspectives about the same person, the character becomes visible from all angles and the reader is able to classify them correctly.

In conclusion, through reading “Across the Bridge,” by Graham Greene, various literary techniques may be observed. The techniques that I admired were the quickly moving plot and the use of rapid character development.