Violence and SexualityĪs a gangster, Pinkie assumes that the only standard by which he will be judged is his toughness, understood as his willingness to engage in violence. Catholic belief-with, as Greene seems to understand it, its greater emphasis on religion and morality as distinct, and often highly critical against worldly society-at once distances these two characters from their society and provides them with a way of understanding the alienation that has been imposed upon them as poor outcasts. Not coincidentally, they also belong to the lower classes of their society in Brighton the blatant and traumatic exposure that Pinkie has to his parents having intercourse, and his subsequent religious-inflected revulsion against it, comes from the squalor of their living conditions. Pinkie and Rose, as the two Roman Catholics of the novel, stand in opposition to the highly secular Ida Arnold and the world of simple, accommodating morals that she represents.

Pinkie, on the other hand, feels threatened by the uncanny and unmanning influence that music has over him an analog of sexuality, it is something that can give him comfort but which he fears because it deprives him of his heightened state of stress that makes him so violently capable.

Ida is introduced as singing in a pub with a warm and mellifluous voice the all-encompassing nature of music is one of the best symbols for her own all-encompassing, and often overwhelming, personality. Pinkie and Ida are archenemies to each other, and one of the ways their opposite characters are most clearly delineated is their relationships to music. Charles Hale, at the beginning of the story, travels around under an alias for the sake of the newspaper sweepstakes also, out of his personal inclination, he tells people he does not know that his name is 'Fred.' Music However, other characters have their own, perhaps less direct, associations with deception. Throughout the novel, Pinkie is a rather despicably devious character that does not shy from lying (or killing people) in order to accomplish his pragmatic aims as a gangster his entire relationship with Rose, for example, is premised on using the lie of loving her in order to silence her. It is precisely because Pinkie's type is in the process of becoming an anachronism that his story gains such pathos. Colleoni, a rival gangster who represents the new businessman-like breed of criminal who reaches a kind of social compromise with the police. Pinkie is the leader of a gang in decline although we do not hear too much about Kite, the former leader and Pinkie's mentor, we can assume that he was not like Mr. As Greene himself said of the story and its context, that world of despair and desperation has since passed, fortunately. The novel is set in the years before the Second World War at the twilight of a time of rampant gang violence.

Brighton rock by graham greene