Pyle in Graham Greene's Novel

Pyle believes that he offers a third alternative to what he sees as the misguided forces at make in Indo-China. The novel, then, is about the awakening of both Pyle and Fowler. Pyle awakens, too late, to the concomitant that his idealistic aims are doomed, and Fowler awakens to the fact that he can no longer stand on the sidelines of the war and of life spot others die around him. It is impossible to understand Pyle without at the a exchange competent(p) time understanding Fowler.

Pyle is attempting to put into action the academic theories he has acquired about the role of the United States in bringing majority rule to the Third realism. Fowler reports:

Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the further East. . . . Democracy was another subject of his--he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world (12).

Officially, Pyle is "employed in the Economic abet Mission" (17), a helpful sounding organization, but in fact he is involved in carrying out distant darker policies. Fowler description of the first time he sees Pyle reveals the apparent honor of the quiet the Statesn:

With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incap able-bodied of harm. . . . Perhaps barely ten days agone he had been walking across the Common in Boston, his implements of war full of the books he had bee

Pyle stands as the symbol of this policy and its murderous results. With some(prenominal) sarcasm, Fowler reports on the specifics of Pyle's engagement in those results. The reader should keep in mind that as he makes his report, Fowler himself is still fresh from having participated in the plot to assassinate Pyle. Here Fowler considers the impact of the news of Pyle's murder on the governance of the region:

Fowler could be describing not only Pyle, but each young, idealistic American of the 1950s who, like Pyle, believed that it was the role and business of the united States to bring democracy to the non-Democratic nations of the world, especially Third World nations which such Americans believed were incapable of determining their own destinies.

One only has to remember what transpired in Vietnam during the deuce decades after the 1955 publication of this novel, two decades marked by millions of deaths on all sides in the separate of idealism, democracy and anti-communism. Greene has proved to be incredibly prescient in his portrait of American idealism gone horribly wrong.

Greene's point, of course, is that the belabor sorts of crimes against humanity are done in the name of utmost ideals. Pyle represents the sort of young American of the 1950s who believed sincerely that America knew what was best for the rest of the world, especially Third World large number who desperately needed American guidance. However, in the end, just like the French before them, the Americans retreated from Vietnam in defeat. never able to understand how such a "backward" people were able to sustain such a courageous fight in the face of overwhelming odds. Pyle and his ilk never understood that the Vietnamese were fighting for their homes and lives and nation--not for abstract and ideal principles based on some political and economic paradise which has never existed and will never exist on this earth. Greene has Pyle be the "quiet American" in order to show the contrast between what one appears
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