The Quiet American Research Paper

The Quiet American is a spy and war novel, written in the mid 1950-s. It’s a novel about possession, murder, obsession and politics. It was first published in December 1955. It is a four-part drama that is written in circular narrative. This novel takes us on a journey in French IndoChina, precisely in Saigon,Vietnam, a site of a rising local insurgency against the French colonial rule. It is a breathtaking journey, with rich imagery of the country, the people, the colors, but it is also a journey about the development of people’s emotions, reasons, and internal battles with themselves and what they presume as what it is right. ‘ It is a brilliant braiding together of a political and a romantic tangle, where it’s characters serve as emblems

When he wrote this particular novel he was inspired by the time that he had spent in Indochina as a war correspondent in the early 1950s. He stayed there for four years and reported about the war in Vietnam. Even though Greene claimed several times that this book does not prove any real stories, the novel raised a controversy for being an Anti-American novel for the way that Greene described American reporters as ‘big, noisy, boyish and middle-aged full of sour cracked against the French( The Quiet American

When the novel was available for the readers for the first time, too many believed that this was an anti-American propaganda, a piece of British triumph over the Americans (Hughes, 1959) Many American critics criticized Greene for his metaphorical violence that he has done to their country, and his way of describing them as ‘a civilization that chews gum, napalm bombs, and uses deodorants’.’ He scorns the American liberals for trying to introduce into Asia their textbook notions of democracy and freedom’(Robert Graham Devis 1956). ‘They’ll be forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves’(The Quiet American