The Quiet American

The film The Quiet American, based off the classic novel by Graham Greene and directed by Phillip Noyce. Based in Saigon, 1952, in the middle of the Vietnam war between the communist and the French. The film follows a long-time war journalist from London named Thomas Fowler and his complicated love life between a catholic woman who does not believe in divorce and the Vietnamese women named Phuong whom he has fallen in love with. Fowler meets an unlikely friend, Alden Pyle, an aid worker for the American Economic Mission who Fowler soon realizes has a second agenda in his work in Saigon. Pyle is a CIA operative who is helping the United States organize a third-party force who will go against both the Vietnamese and French forces. The first scene of The Quiet American speaks a lot to what will unfold later throughout the film. Fading back and forth between a young, beautiful Vietnamese woman, bombings and a flickering flame. Following in the theme of switching between beauty and pain a voice starts speaking and says “Whatever you are looking for you will find, you will understand love in a few minutes. Smell promises everything, in exchange for your soul. The heat is horrible, makes you forget everything. At night, the river is beautiful. It could help you forget there was war.” The feeling this…

Before reading the novel The Quiet American, I never suspected that one of the themes or the overall message of the novel would be the betrayal which occurs between human beings. This novel supports a saying that my grandmother always tells me when I tell her that I have been betrayed by someone very close, she says, “You never really get to fully know a person.” Besides the novel 's drama of love and war, honesty and deception, I would argue that it projects a big message which is the betrayal…

1. The main topic of this reading is Graham Greene’s book, The Quiet American. The author of the article, Kevin Ruane, is focused on analyzing Graham Greene’s book as a historical document and works to unravel the possible implications from analyzing the book as a historical document. 2. The main argument that the author makes is to assert that Greene’s book is more truth than fantasy. The author asserts that by looking at the situations of the characters in the book, Greene’s book is a…

Graham Greene utilizes the various characters in his novel, The Quite American, to express many of the political and diplomatic viewpoints about the involvement of various countries in the affairs of the people of Indochina and Southeast Asia. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, The Quiet American (1958), distorts the two main characters, Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle, away from the novel’s version so as to present a viewpoint consistent and pleasurable for the audience with the era in which the film was…

The Quiet American by Graham Greene Graham Greene’s fascinating novel The Quiet American is about two men who fall in love with the same women in Vietnam during the French and Indochina War. The protagonist, Thomas Fowler, and another English journalist, Alden Pyle, both shared a love for Phuong. The author of this novel, Graham Greene, wrote many stories that dealt with American and English involvement in foreign wars. Being born in Berkhamsted Hertfordshire, England, Graham suffered from…

The story of an innocent murderer tells the tale of a man who truly believed his intentions were good, but as he delved deeper into the hole, he suddenly realized that he had helped kill hundreds. In The Quiet American by Graham Greene, Alden Pyle’s character proves to play a vital role in promoting the central theme of the novel, moral ambiguity. The narrative’s title stays true in describing this young American’s personality as being docile, preserved, introverted, and most of all quiet…

Gabriella Perez Dr. Cochran The Quiet American The Quiet American novel is a novel about anti-war. Greene wanted to use the characters and situations to portray what was happening between United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The novel demonstrates how the desire of colonialism built tension between the United States and the Soviet Union changed over time and how it affected the decisions that each country made. Both sides had political differences and wanted to influence…

In the novel “The Quiet American” by Graham Green, Pyle fails to learn that duty to one’s ideals or beliefs should not cloak the reality of the world because his innocent and naive nature does not allow him to accept any other beliefs besides democracy. As Pyle puts it after he is partially responsible for the death of many Vietnamese civilians, “you could say they died for democracy” (171). Pyle believes that the fight for democracy is worth the cost of human life because they died for a good…

Special Circumstance Essay I was born on the smallest country in the mainland of Africa, The Gambia. Gambia was colonized by the British which made english its official language. Mostly everybody who was born past the time of the colonization knew english, but they still spoke their home language which was mainly Mandingo. I was one of those people I knew english and Mandingo. Life changed when I moved to the United States with my younger brother and my mother to be with my father who was living…

"No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. " [Nixon]. In order to understand this event, one ultimately needs to examine the cause and every possible perspective of that cause. After World War II, the Vietnamese people anticipated reunification and democracy away from French rule. The Vietnamese were hindered heavily by French colonialism, resulting in the increasing popularity of communist revolutionary, Ho Chi…