Graham Greene - The Quiet American: Text and Criticism

Pros: characters; gripping story; description; dialogue
Cons: switching from present to past from chapter to chapter might confuse some

Maybe you know this already, but people who disarm (or annoy) you with their quiet, innocent, polite ways may be the most dangerous kind of people you meet. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’ll give you an example with the astute help of ...

Pros: A rich and clever plot eerily foreshadowing the Vietnam and Irak wars.
Cons: The second remake of this movie with Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine was exceedingly disapointing.

"The mysterious is always attractive. People will always follow a vail" (Jarrett, The House of Gold). Exoticism is mystery, seduction, escape... the unknown. In Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American, exoticism is expressed through people, places, ...

Pros: Everything:the characters, the writing,the plot,the conclusion, the effecting portrayal of a rich moral dilemma.
Cons: requires more than basic knowledge of Vietnamese politics

Graham Green’s The Quite American is one of those rare, indescribable pieces of literature that works its inexplicable magic on the reader leaving him or her with a lasting sense of having experienced, not just read, something truly great. The ...

Pros: Excellent foreshadowing of America's later involvement in Vietnam.
Cons: The chronology of the book can be somewhat confusing at times.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene is a terrific novel that ties together the political situation in Vietnam in the early 1950s with an involving fictional plot. There are three main characters in the book. Thomas Fowler is a middle-aged British...

Pros: It is a rather short novel.
Cons: Hard to get into without a background in the subject.

This review reveals major details about the book's plot.

Graham Greene's The Quiet American, is a view of life in Vietnam during the French-Indochina War. Greene's points throughout the novel focus on man's disregard for other human...

Pros: Well written and involving
Cons: Best read on location

The Quiet American is a classic novel that is best read "in situ", that is in the present, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)to get its full meaning, flavor and significance .It is set in the period of the French colonial involvement in...

Pros: Excellent expose of the motivations which guided American policymakers in the Vietnam conflict
Cons: This is not an obvious statement of intentions, but a well-written study of psychological impetuses.

Graham Greene provides a scathing and accurate assessment of the psychology of America's involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Although this work is a fictional one, Greene has captured the utter blindness with which American policy makers approached our...

Pros: Complex...How others mirror ourselves...how we are fickle with our fears of loneliness.
Cons: None really. It's not a thriller, but is masterful and understated.

This book will lull you into a detached necessity to read......Excellent, forlorn thoughts and observations from ex-pat reporter in troubled Vietnam.....Decadent, empty, lonely and cynical feelings articulated towards the age gap.....his wisdom of perspective that sees through and past idealism of the young American Pyle....a part of his own self that is lost and that he is responsible ultimately for murdering.......

His woman is dependent upon him, a fickle sense of need....and he is naturally afraid of losing her to a younger man who will bring him loneliness. This is the truth behind Desire and Motivation.....the political/personal reasons....Is Phoung keeping him with her pipes...?

It is a vivid and insightful account. The weaknesses of mankind...the conscience we have towards others.....The burden of knowledge, and wisdom and age....

Filled with the drugs of causes and deeds, and yet almost a bid for his old age to come...to bring the resignation from them; a sense of something at least, more simple.