Dec 29, 2009

The Quiet American | Literary Precedents

The theme of the American innocent abroad is as much a theme of American literature as it is British. It goes back to Mark Twain's novel Innocents Abroad (1869), and in Henry James's "Daisy Miller" (1878), Daisy dies because of her innocence. Yet Greene's novel is more sophisticated than a simple condemnation of American naiveté. Even though Pyle is condemned, Fowler is far from exonerated. The story is more related to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902). Although it would seem at first that it is Kurtz, like Pyle, who has lost his innocence in a strange third world,...