Graham Greene's The Quiet American can be read as a cautionary tale because it so vividly identifies the patterns of awareness and behavior adopted by the nation-state personalities that were involved in Vietnam in the post-World War II period. The novel has a copyright date of 1955, one year after the defeat of the French forces in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, and it is set in 1952, a period when the Viet Minh insurgency against the French colonial government was gaining ground.
The moral content of The Quiet American arises in part from the fact that each character stands for an idea or a national-culture "type." The world-weary journalist Fowler has seen it all and in a way revels in his cynicism and frankly colonialist attitudes. "I had never desired faith," he says. "The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable" (88). His mistress Phuong is the thoroughly colonized country, self-absorbed and lacking sophisticated understanding of the colonizer and not particularly thrilled, but not overtly hostile. The people of the country just want to get along. Whether she remains with Fowler or takes up with Pyle is a matter of some indifference. Only where she is concerned is Fowler emotionally vulnerable.
With Pyle and Vigot the allegorical analogues become somewhat more complex. Vigot is the figure of French colonialism, and he is intelligent enough to suspect that as an "Economic Attaché" Pyle is probably a spy, but he is a convinced American. Fowler's assessment of Pyle is that Pyle is naïve and artless, part of "a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor . . . and you meant what your father meant by the same words" (90).
American certainty overlooks the gap between the idea and its execution, but the fact that the US is a geopolitical behemoth trumps any criticism of its behavior and prevents it from entertaining doubt about its politic...