While he praises objectivity, he argues that sooner or later people of conscience have to take a stand for social justice, as Fowler eventually did to help stop the covert activities of the principal CIA agent in Saigon, Alden Pyle. While exploring notions regarding journalistic ethics, Greene also explores the notion of political commitment.

Greene’s novel centres around a middle-aged British foreign correspondent stationed in Vietnam, Thomas Fowler, which provides the author the opportunity to philosophise about the role of the media during wartime and the responsibility of journalists to objectively pursue the truth, even when these truths go against the interests of their own Western governments. Greene is also highly critical of the imperialism practised by the European powers that led to the subordination of Asian, African, and South American peoples, although he sees this tutelage as preferable to the neo-colonialism of the United States, which sought the economic and cultural domination of emerging Third World nations as well as the suppression of communist political organisations within those nations.Īs well as expressing a pronounced pacifist sensibility, Greene’s novel is also pro-Marxist and sympathetic to the communists, especially when the novel presents the argument that the CIA’s proxies were actually responsible for terrorist atrocities that were blamed on communist fifth columnists.

According to Greene, Americans seek to do ‘good’ but produce harm. Specifically, Greene is critical of the realpolitik and utilitarian ethics of the CIA operatives who treat the lives of ordinary people as expendable in the pursuit of their objectives. Greene criticises the CIA for engaging in covert operations to contain the spread of communism that Greene believed led to political instability, war, and all the suffering that this inflicts on ordinary people.

In particular, Greene criticises the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had recently replaced the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The novel is primarily an expression of the author’s anti-Americanism or, more precisely, it is a critique of US foreign policy in South-East Asia during the Cold War. Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955) is set during the Vietnam War in the early to mid-1950s, not long before the defeat of the French colonial forces by the predominantly communist Viet Minh.

The quiet american by graham greene