Colonial mentality in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

Abstract

This dissertation which concentrates on a critical study of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, is an attempt to explore the presence of colonial mentality that assumes the superb status of the whites over non-whites in term of race, civilization, ethnicity. This paper basically focuses upon underlying psychic patterns, behaviors and manners of the white protagonist and narrator named Thomas Fowler, who, as a product of white cultural background, expresses his colonial attitudes by representing everything non-white as ‘other’, inferior, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘marginal’. Fowler shows his love and sympathy towards the non-European such as Phuong and Dominguez but his love and sympathy remains till they serve him. Such Eurocentric and ethnocentric and racist attitudes and biases are the sole products of colonial mentality shared by Greene and externalized through the protagonist, Fowler, in The Quiet American.