Food for thought

1. What can you say about the effect produced by alliteration in the initial lines?

2. What is the symbolic meaning of the word “olive”?

3. What thematic set comes into being in the first paragraph? How does the precise timing add to the atmosphere.

4. Speak about the anaphorical beginning of the first and the third paragraphs.

5. What is the function of the opposed thematic set in the third paragraph?

6. Comment on the usage of the definite article in the third paragraph.

7. Why is the word “Spain” reiterated in the text? Comment on the usage of other geographical names in the text.

8. How does the use of polysematic words (cf . “rise”, “people”) contribute to the idea of an iceburg?

9. Comment on the treatment of religeous ideas in the text. Discuss the motif of Resurrection.

10. How do you understand the expression “to enter the earth honorably”?

11. Comment on the strong positions of the text.

12. Give a summary of analysis of the story.

Topics for discussion

1. Speak about the Civil War in the USA (1861-65) and in Spain (1936-39).

2. Divide the text into two thematic parts and compare them. What idea is developed through the pairs of opposed words?

3. Analyse the way the principle of iceburg is revealed in the text.

GRAHAM GREENE (1904 - 1992)

GRAHAM GREENE (b. Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Eng.-d. April 3, 1991, Vcvcy, Switz.), English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life's moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings. The Quiet American (1956) chronicles the doings of a well-intentioned American government agent in Vietnam in the midst of the anti-French uprising there in the early 1950s.

The world Grcene's characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the tone of his works einphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force. His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence, and physical decay. Greene's chief concern is the moral and spiritual struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political upheavals.

Despite the downbeat tone of much of his subject matter, Greene was in fact one of the most widely read British novelists of the 20th century. His books' unusual popularity is due partly to his production of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue but more importantly to his superb gifts as a storyteller, especially his masterful selection of detail and his use of realistic dialogue in a fast-paced narrative.

THE QUIET AMERICAN

Part III. Chapter II

“There mustn't be any American casualties, must there?” An ambulance forced its way up the rue Catinat into the square, and the policeman who had stopped me moved to one side to let it through. The policeman beside him was engaged in an argument. I pushed Pyle forward and ahead of me into the square before we could be stopped.

We were among a congregation of mourners. The police could prevent others entering the square; they were powerless to clear the square of the survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence. It was like a church I had once visited during Mass – the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw-driver.

Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?” “Blood,” I said. “Haven't you ever seen it before?”

He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.

“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children – it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?” He said weakly, “There was to have been a parade.” “And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.” “I didn’t know”.

“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be better informed.” “I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “They should have called it off.”

“And missed the fun?” I asked him. “Do you expect General Thieu to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren't , in a war. This will hit the world's Press. You've, put General Thieu on the map all right, Pyle. You've got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed - there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about.”

A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, “What’s the good? He’ll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

He said, “Thieu wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn't. Somebody deceived him. The Communists...”

He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance. I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already people were flocking in: it must have been a comfort to them to be able to pray for the dead and to the dead.

Notes

trishaw-driver – a bicycle rickshaw

Phat Diem – a town in Viet Nam

Diolacton – an explosive substance

General Thieu – a general who belonged to the Caodaists, one of the influential religious and political sects

The rue Catinat – the name of the street

Food for thought

1. Speak about the paradox in the title.

2. What thematic set comes into being in the initial lines?

3. Find out all the stylistic devices used in the second paragraph.

4. Speak about the impression produced by the sight of victims.

5. Why is the decription of the victims so cynical?

6. Comment on Pyle’s words “It’s awful”.

7. What is the narrator’s attitude to Pyle? How is it revealed in the dialogue?

8. Speak about the context in which the word “innocent” is repeated.

9. Analyse the biblical allusion in the closing paragraph. Speak on the role of religion and the main character’s attitude to it.

Topics for discussion

1. Discuss the aim of introducing the device of retardation.

2. The description is focussed not on the events as such but on the behaviour of people under circumstances. Find some instances to prove the idea.

3. Greene has a graphic eye. Speak about the details permitting the reader to supply the missing links.

4. Comment on the author’s attitude to the West and to the East.

5. Speak about the main idea of the text.

GRAHAM GREENE (1904 – 1991)

THE COMEDIANS.

Chapter III.3.

Doctor Magiot gave me dinner that night at his own home, and in addition he gave me a great deal of good advice which I was unwise enough to discount because I thought he might perhaps have an idea of obtaining the hotel for another client.

It was the one share he possessed in my mother's company which made me suspicious even though I held the signed transfer.

He lived on the lower slopes of Petionville in a house of three storeys like a miniature version of my own hotel with its tower and its lace-work balconies. In the garden grew a dry spiky Norfolk pine, like an illustration in a Victorian novel, and the only modern object in the room, where we sat after dinner, was the telephone: It was like an oversight in a museum-arrangement. The heavy drape of the scarlet curtains, the woollen cloths on the occasional tables with bobbles at each corner, the china objects on the chimney-piece that included two dogs with the same gentle gaze as Doctor Magiot's, the portraits of the doctor's parents (coloured photographs mounted on mauve silk in oval frames), the pleated screen in the unnecessary fireplace, spoke of another age; the literary works in a glass-fronted bookcase (Doctor Magiot kept his professional works in his consulting-room) were bound in old-fashioned calf. I examined them while he was out 'washing his hands,' as he put it in polite English. There were Les Miserables in three volumes, Les Mysteres de Paris with the last volume missing, several of Gaboriau's romans policiers, Renan's Vie de Jesus, and rather surprisingly among its companions Marx's Capital rebound in exactly the same calf so that it was indistinguishable at a distance from Les Miserables. The lamp at Doctor Magiot's elbow had a pink glass shade, and quite wisely, for even in those days the electric-current was erratic, it was oil-burning.

'You really intend,' Doctor Magiot asked me, 'to take over the hotel?'

'Why not? I have a little experience of restaurant-work. I can see great possibilities of improvement. My mother was not catering for the luxury-trade.' 'The luxury-trade?' Doctor Magiot repeated. 'I think you can hardly depend on that here.'

'Some hotels do.'

'The good years will not always continue. Not very long now and there will be the elections...'

'It doesn't make much difference, does it, who wins?'

'Not for the poor. But to the tourist perhaps.' He put a flowered saucer upon the table beside me — an ash-tray would have been out of period in this room where no one had ever smoked in the old days. He handled the saucer carefully, as though it were of precious porcelain. He was very big and very black, but he possessed great gentleness — he would never ill-treat, I felt sure, even an inanimate object, such as a recalcitrant chair. Nothing can be more inconsiderate to a man of Doctor Magiot's profession than a telephone. But when it rang once during our conversation he lifted the receiver as gently as he would have raised a patient's wrist.

'You have heard,' Doctor Magiot said, 'of the Emperor Christophe?'

'Of course.'

'Those days could return very easily. More cruelly perhaps and certainly more ignobly. God save us from a little Christophe.'

'Nobody could afford to frighten away the American tourists. You need the dollars.'

'When you know us better, you will realize that we don't live on money here, we live on debts. You can always afford to kill a creditor, but no one ever kills a debtor.'

'Whom do you fear?'

'I fear a small country-doctor. His name would mean nothing to you now. I only hope you don't see it one day stuck up in electric-lights over the city. If that day comes I promise you I shall run to cover.' It was Doctor Magiot's first mistaken prophecy. He underrated his own stubbornness or his own courage. Otherwise I would not have been waiting for him later beside the dry swimming-pool where the ex-Minister lay still as a hunk of beef in a butcher’s shop.

Notes.

The action takes place the night after Brown’s mother’s funeral.