The Quiet and the Unquiet American: Greene and Ellsberg

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) has often been seen as prescient in forecasting the fate of American intervention in Vietnam. Of course, in the early 1950s the US was a long way from being mired in an intractable war, but as American intervention in the Vietnamese conflict increased, Greene’s novel helped create the narrative paradigm that journalists, such as David Halberstam, and other writers, such as Daniel Ellsberg, looked to when they wrote about their experiences of the Vietnam War. As Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and others explain, the resulting narratives unavoidably drew on established structures—in Ellsberg’s case the conversion narrative that underpins his memoir of the Pentagon Papers’ release—to frame their experiences. Greene’s novel, which Halberstam and others circulated in Vietnam and which achieved wide popularity in the US during the Vietnam War, was instrumental in establishing a context for writing and for remembering that war. The impact of The Quiet American goes far beyond what anyone in the early 1950s could have anticipated.