Graham Greene described A Burnt-Out Case as ‘an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief, in the kind of setting, removed from world-politics, and household preoccupations, where such differences are felt acutely and find expression. This Congo is a region of the mind …’ (BOC, Preface). Because all Greene's novels are born of the duel between feeling and thought, they also represent many different but similar Congos. Sometimes referred to as Greeneland, they are more interestingly seen as an area of human consciousness in which the absence of God leaves the psyche abandoned to its own internal debate, attempting to find a ground for its being. The pain to which such a struggle gives birth – a psychomachia, as it was once called – creates both a longing for release, a cessation of pain, and in the absence of suicide, the need to find a way of going on living. Greene believed the writer to be someone who always showed the inadequacy of the status quo; but the problem often presented itself to him – as it did to Ivan in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov – in the form of a temptation to return his entrance ticket.

About suicide, from a non-theological perspective, Dr Magiot in The Comedians makes a short discourse over the dead body of Dr Philipot, found in Brown's swimming pool. In Scobie's case, the matterwas seen very differently, because suicide meant damnation.

A little later in the same novel, the counterfeit Major Jones offers Mr Brown a share in his next scheme for getting rich quick.