Graham Greene
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Graham Greene was a major British novelist for many decades and was noted for his inclusion of political subject matter and points of view in his works. He often wrote directly about trouble spots in the world--The Comedians was set in Papa Doc's Haiti, for instance, while A Burnt-Out Case is set in the Congo. His novel The Quiet American from 1955 is set in Vietnam, a country few Americans had even heard of in 1955 when the French were engaged in the sort of guerilla war America would face a few years later in the same country. In this novel, he offers an interesting picture of the politics of the region, of the role taken by foreign powers, and of the nature of warfare and revolution in that country. What he says in 1955 casts an interesting light not only on the role of the French in the 1950s but on what would face America in the 1960s. The main character in the novel is also the first-person narrator of the events, and significantly, he is a reporter for a London newspaper. He sees Vietnam from the point of view of the journalist who tries to make sense of what is taking place, and specifically he must reconstruct in his mind the events leading to the assassination of an American official named Pyle, which is how the novel opens. Pyle is supposed to meet Fowler that evening, but he never arrives because he is killed, as a policeman tells Fowler. Fowler says has no idea why Pyle wanted to see him or whether it is connected with his death, but he knows far more t
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The impressive thing about Greene's political reporting is his refusal to be misled by his personal preferences. There is no doubt where his sympathies lay but he admitted that every Vietnamese welcomed the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The movement was a nationalist one and only Western clumsiness was compelling it to become Communist (Atkins 228).
A.A. DeVitis points out that the novel is infused with the philosophy of Existentialism but that much of the political aspect of the novel stands apart from that philosophy. DeVitis says that the actions of Fowler are based on a form of Catholic Existentialism. DeVitis also believes that the political realities of Indochina, or Vietnam, are compressed in the novel into the differences between human beings:
The ideologies of Alden Pyle, the quiet American; of General ThT, the exponent and head of the cult of power mysteriously referred to as the Third Force; of Vigot, the disinterested French administrator of justice who reads Pascal; of Heng, the Communist, who forces Fowler to "engage" or to take sides if only "to remain human"--all these are dramatized in the relationships that ultimately form the meaning of the novel. For, although the background is political and althoug
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Approximate Word count = 1655
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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