American Ignorance In Graham Greene's The Quiet American

In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Fowler is more justified as portrayed through Greene’s themes of American ignorance, and the views of the Vietnamese.

While Pyle claims to want to protect Vietnam, Fowler understands that American intervention is not sustainable due to the lack of interest the Vietnamese people show towards a central government. When Fowler is discussing the Vietnamese viewpoint to Pyle, he explains that, “They want enough rice...they don’t want to be shot at”(Greene 86). Fowler’s statement to Pyle claiming that “they don’t want to be shot at” is an allusion to what American intervention could do to the Vietnamese people; the Americans would be the force that kills the Vietnamese if they were to intervene, not the people

The idea Pyle implies that they’ll be forced to believe is communism, an idea that Pyle thinks is awful enough to justify American intervention to save the Vietnamese people. Although Pyle’s intentions may be right, the point he fails to address is that the Vietnamese people would not be affected enough by a central government in order to justify intervention. A majority of the Vietnamese people are local farmers working day to day trying to survive and feed their family, the last thing they would want would be a war that could cost possibly millions of lives for a purpose that none of them cared about. In Lessons of Vietnam, when explaining the viewpoint most Vietnamese held, it stated that “Most Vietnamese did not develop a strong sense of participation in the political process”(Lessons 7). When lessons states that most Vietnamese didn’t develop a sense of participation in the political process, this can be largely attributed to the fact that a majority of the Vietnamese people were farmers so they had no reason to care about the political process. There would be no reason for someone like Pyle to want to impose his western beliefs on the Vietnamese because most of them were disinterested in a central government because it didn’t affect them, imposing a system that doesn’t benefit a