"Being involved"

community and commitment in Graham Greene's The quiet American

Paula Martín Salván

pp. 105-122

in: Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Julian Jiménez Heffernan (eds), Community in twentieth-century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The keyword in most readings of The Quiet American (1955) is undoubtedly "commitment." Around this concept, a recurrent narrative pattern in Graham Greene's novels may be sketched: conflict is often articulated in terms of an incompatibility between individual and common interest that can only be resolved through a personal sacrifice—an act of true commitment—meant to restore the stability of (legitimate or spurious) communitarian interests. The present chapter aims to explore the communitarian dynamics in The Quiet American from this perspective. I will focus on the two planes on which communitarian formations are proposed, discussed and confronted in the novel, namely, the personal-individual level that is articulated through the triangular relationship between the three main characters—Fowler, Phuong and Pyle—and the collective-political level expressed through the competing ideologies struggling for power in 1950s Indochina.

Cited authors

Greene Graham