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Across the Bridge
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For the film adaptation, see Across the Bridge (film).
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Across the Bridge is a 1938 short story by Graham Greene.
[edit] Plot
The story is told first-person by an unnamed narrator who reveals little about himself, other than that he is a wandering stranger stranded in a small Mexican border village. The narrator is fascinated by Joseph Calloway, a famous con-man believed to be extremely wealthy, who is in the Mexican village on the run from the law. The narrator claims to feel sympathy not for Calloway but for Calloway's dog, an ugly creature that he repeatedly kicks. Two detectives enter the village looking for Calloway, but though they have several conversations with the con-man, they never realize he is their quarry. Meanwhile, Calloway, overcome by homesickness for America, manages to get himself secreted across the border. In the end, Calloway is killed by the detectives' car, apparently while trying to save the dog's life. The narrator claims to find something comic in the end of Calloway's life. He writes "Death doesn't change comedy to tragedy." The reader is left to evaluate the meaning of this statement and to weigh both the tragic and the comic elements of the story.
The story builds its tension on dramatic irony, with the narrator knowing more about the story than both Calloway and the detectives, and the Mexican natives knowing more than the narrator, who says, "Any man doing dusty business in any of the wooden booths in the town is better fitted by long observation to tell Mr Calloway's tale than I am."
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Works by Graham Greene
Novels
The Man Within (1929)
The Name of Action (1930)
Rumour at Nightfall (1932)
Stamboul Train (1932)
It's a Battlefield (1934)
England Made Me (1935)
The Bear Fell Free (1935)
A Gun for Sale (1936)
Brighton Rock (1938)
The Confidential Agent (1939)
The Power and the Glory (1940)
The Ministry of Fear (1943)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
The Third Man (novella; 1949)
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Quiet American (1955)
Loser Takes All (1955)
Our Man in Havana (1958)
A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
The Comedians (1966)
Travels with My Aunt (1969)
The Honorary Consul (1973)
The Human Factor (1978)
Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980)
Monsignor Quixote (1982)
The Tenth Man (1985)
The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
No Man's Land (2005)
Travel books
Journey Without Maps (1936)
The Lawless Roads (1939)
In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961)
Plays
The Living Room (1953)
The Potting Shed (1957)
The Complaisant Lover (1959)
Carving a Statue (1964)
The Return of A.J. Raffles (1975)
The Great Jowett (1981)
Yes and No (1983)
For Whom the Bell Chimes (1983)
Screenplays
The Future's in the Air (1937)
The New Britain (1940)
21 Days (1940)
Brighton Rock (1947)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
The Third Man (1949)
Loser Takes All (1956)
Saint Joan (1957)
Our Man in Havana (1959)
The Comedians (1967)
Short story collections
Twenty-One Stories (1954)
A Sense of Reality (1963)
May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
The Last Word and Other Stories (1990)
Short stories
"Proof Positive" (1930)
"The Basement Room" (1936)
"Across the Bridge" (1938)
"Alas, Poor Maling" (1940)
"The Blue Film" (1954)
"The Destructors" (1954)
"A Shocking Accident"
"The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen"
"The Last Word"
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Categories:
1938 short stories
Short stories by Graham Greene
Short stories adapted into films
Pinewood Studios films
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This page was last modified on 19 January 2012 at 09:34.
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