Imperialism In The Quiet American

“The Quiet American” has a lot of negative statements regarding America and has often been criticized as anti-American because of its political analysis (Reshetova, 2003, p.6). Even though Graham Greene does not make any prejudices, he still presents Pyle as an American who is ignorant and who attempts to form a “third force” in Vietnam. Moreover, the political involvement that America had in Vietnam cannot be ignored in the book. Through the novel the narrator Fowler often criticizes Pyle as a foolish inexperienced American because he wants to form a third force in Vietnam, as Fowler thinks that communism and imperialism are not a solution for the Vietnamese people. Pyle thinks that the creation of the Third Force will stop the war on the one hand and French imperialism on the other hand and also help the country calm the bad situation and subsequently bring peace upon it (Radecki, 2005,

At first, Pyle and America are displayed as helping the Vietnamese people, but undercover they went there to protect their political interests. In the novel Fowler fairly says to Pyle: “You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested … they want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want. …. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” (Greene, 1955, p.86). Fowler tells Pyle that the third world does not need the first world to tell them what they want. The third world may live under difficult conditions, poverty and political chaos, but that does not imply that America or other powerful countries will attack these third world nations whenever they