Proof Positive. Illustrated

The story unfolds in a quiet London club, where a seemingly respectable gentleman, Major Weaver, delivers a strange and unsettling address on the persistence of life after death. His calm, precise tone and his insistence on “proof” lend his words an eerie authority — until the truth of his condition becomes horrifyingly clear.

With characteristic subtlety, Greene transforms a simple encounter into a meditation on the fragility of existence and the uneasy coexistence of skepticism and belief. Beneath the restrained atmosphere and polished dialogue lies an undercurrent of dread — the sense that civilization itself rests upon illusions as fragile as life.

Proof Positive exemplifies Greene’s mastery of the short form: a tale at once realistic and metaphysical, ironic and compassionate. It belongs to that distinctive realm of “Greeneland,” where the spiritual and the corrupt, the banal and the miraculous, are forever intertwined.

Disturbing, elegant, and thought-provoking, Proof Positive remains one of Graham Greene’s most memorable short works — a perfect fusion of moral tension and gothic unease that lingers long after the final line.