The Power and the Glory

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1940

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Character Analysis

The Whisky Priest

The novel’s protagonist, the whisky priest initially seems an unlikely hero: An alcoholic priest who has fathered a child, he flees from the law and doubts his own faith. Even before his religion is outlawed, thus making him a fugitive, the whisky priest has indulged in sin—mostly, the sin of pride. In addition, he’s an outsider in his own land; the fact that Mr. Tench refers to him as “the stranger” only highlights his anonymity and foreignness. The whisky priest speaks English because he attended seminary in the US: ”He can pass as a gringo” (22), the chief tells the lieutenant. His itinerant existence, traveling in between cities and villages, always on the run from the law, sets him apart from the other characters. He moves in the liminal spaces between languages, between places, between sinfulness and saintliness.

When Mr. Tench first encounters the whisky priest, he describes his forlorn state: “He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness” (14). Devoid even of a name, the whisky priest has been hollowed out by circumstances, emptied of the pretense that once attended his vocation. He remembers himself when he was a young and ambitious priest, “energetic” and “waving a plump and eloquent hand […] he saw no reason why one day he might not find himself in the state capital, attached to the cathedral, leaving another man to pay off the debts” (93) in his first parish. Those days have disappeared, however, engulfed by the vagaries of politics and history that conspired to make him a fugitive.

In addition, the priest is well aware that it isn’t only the uncontrollable forces of history that led him to this state; it’s also the result of his own actions and lapses. As he returns to Concepción, the parish in which he fathered a child, he reflects on his fall from grace: “He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind—a whisky priest” (60). His weakness for alcohol led directly to the sexual indiscretion that resulted in a child. Furthermore, he refuses to repent this sin, for it has produced a young girl, Brigitta, whom he desperately loves—another sin, for he loves an individual the way he should love the entire mass of humanity, as befits his position. Even as he enjoys a moment of respite at the Lehrs, remembering what it was like to carry the authority of the priesthood, he can’t escape who he has become:

The smell of brandy dried in his mouth. […] He turned the glass in his hand, and all the other glasses turned too: he remembered the dentist talking of his children and Maria unearthing the bottle of spirits she had kept for him—the whisky priest (168).

Nevertheless, he endures, even as he doubts and even as he drinks. He evades the police, continuing to say Mass when he can and hearing confession when he’s able. The simple act of survival becomes noble.

Notably, the whisky priest, like the two other main characters detailed below, is never given a proper name. On one hand, this makes him a mere archetype, an anonymous template onto which certain behaviors can be inscribed. On the other hand, the whisky priest becomes a more realized individual as he struggles with his faith; grapples with his sense of duty; fears pain and death; and loves deeply. These universal experiences endow him with humanity, and his specific circumstances turn him into a tragic hero: In the end, he’s executed for his very identity.

The Lieutenant

Like the whisky priest, the lieutenant is never given a proper name. He could easily become a stereotypical example of military might or faceless bureaucracy, yet the author contrives to create a more complicated character. The lieutenant has his own unyielding set of beliefs, along with an elevated sense of responsibility and duty; he’s also thoughtful and philosophically curious. While he’s the whisky priest’s nemesis, bound by law to capture and execute the traitor, he isn’t the book’s antagonist. Instead, he functions as a mirror of the priest himself. The two men aren’t as different as one might expect given their positions on the opposing sides of history.

As the lieutenant is walking home, contemplating his mission to capture the whisky priest, he thinks of the new world, without religion, that he’s helping engender: “There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk—a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again” (24). The lieutenant represents the new order; he’s the symbolic priest of the post-religious, liberated world. His deeply cultivated sense of belief has led him to conclude that religion is mere superstition, that secularism is his calling: “He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all” (25). Perhaps the one element that separates the lieutenant from the whisky priest is his more secure faith in the absence of religious significance.

Still, the lieutenant operates within the boundaries of a moral code: He won’t execute the whisky priest without a trial (though the priest isn’t allowed to participate on his own behalf); he’ll allow for the free discussion of ideas; he’ll even attempt to procure another priest to whom his prisoner can confess. When he fails in that mission, he provides the whisky priest with a flask of brandy; he’s respectful and compassionate toward his enemy. Ultimately, however, his secular mission falters in the face of deeply held beliefs given that none of his efforts convince the villagers to renounce their faith, and he encounters the power of religious authority. The lieutenant feels “without a purpose” (207) once the whisky priest is in custody: “The lieutenant reopened the door; mechanically putting his hand again upon his revolver, he felt moody, as though now the last priest was under lock and key, there was nothing left to think about” (207). After the whisky priest’s execution, another priest appears, attesting to the eternal nature of the lieutenant’s battle.

The Mestizo

A character of mixed Indigenous and European heritage, the mestizo functions as the novel’s true antagonist. He’s the Judas figure to the whisky priest’s Christ, and he surfaces and resurfaces throughout the novel in uncanny ways. He fortuitously appears along the whisky priest’s circuitous route before the priest briefly shakes him off, only to glimpse a sight of him within the crowds at the capital. He shows up in the prison where the whisky priest spends an anxious night, still unwilling to betray the priest because his financial interest is at stake. Finally, he reappears just as the whisky priest is making his final break to freedom and inexorably draws the priest to his doom.

The mestizo is characterized from the start by his unattractive appearance and obsequious behavior. The whisky priest’s impressions are unflattering: “He had only two teeth left, canines which stuck yellowly out at either end of his mouth like the teeth you find encased in clay which have belonged to long-extinct animals” (84). The yellowness of the teeth speaks to decay and poverty—later, his “yellow malarial eyes” (92) mark him as diseased, while their placement suggests his predatory nature. When the whisky priest happens upon him, he’s reposing in a hammock, swinging back and forth with nothing pressing to do. His deferential gestures toward the priest, like his emotional outbursts, are disingenuous, manufactured for effect. Thus, the mestizo embodies the characteristics of the stereotypical “native,” from the colonial point of view: He’s lazy and opportunistic; self-serving and greedy; diseased and immoral.

Indeed, the mestizo becomes one of the sources of the whisky priest’s doubt. If man is made in God’s image, then that image is tainted: “God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip” (101). Later, the priest sees the mestizo, with his “defensive smile,” and thinks of him as “the small pain that reminds a man of his sickness” (177). The mestizo represents everything about humankind that has fallen from grace. The mestizo’s final betrayal is even couched in the language of religion, as befits a hypocrite: “I’m here, father,” he announces, “on an errand of mercy” (177). He then leads the whisky priest to the American fugitive, where the police capture him.

The mestizo is a doubly dispossessed figure; he’s marginalized by his poverty and, more significantly, by his “half-caste” status (88). While he’s clearly the villain of the story, he’s also the victim of racial stereotyping, often typical of the era in which the author is writing. However, the mestizo, like the whisky priest and the lieutenant, is only another pawn swept up in the convulsions of history. The whisky priest ultimately “bore no grudge because he expected nothing else of anything human” (198). At the least, he thinks, “that yellow and unreliable face would be absent” at his execution (198). Like another infamous betrayer, the mestizo won’t be witness to the martyrdom.