Theme of Death in The Quiet American by Graham Greene Essay Example
This theme is connected mainly with Fw. He came to Vietnam to find his death. He knew there was war and he hoped that death would come to him quickly. He was tired, worn. We can feel his weariness with life, with the heat, with the whole human condition. He was pessimistic about everything. From childhood he had never believed in permanence, and yet he had longed for it. Always he was afraid of losing happiness. Phuong was happiness for him. That month, next year, she would leave him. She was young, full of life, as her sister and Pyle said, she needed children.
Besides he was married and his wife refused to give him divorce. Pyle was his rival, amore eligible candidate for Phuong. He was young, polite, handsome, strong, secure, healthy, he could marry her. So, death was
...the only value for him. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. Death was even far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. To kill a man is to grant him an immeasurable benefit. People always love their enemies. It is their friends they preserve for pain and vacuity.
He knew life was cruel, full of betrayal, lie, indifference, loneliness, pain, suffering, promiscuity. He envied the officer condemned to the chance of death. But at the same time he contradicted himself. He had Phuong who slept beside him every night, and he didn’t want to die. Moreover, we remember the episode crossing the canal which had been full of bodies and reminded of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped
one head, seal-grey, stuck up out of the water like a buoy.
There was no blood: it had flowed away a long time ago. And Fw took his eyes away; he didn’t want to be reminded of how little they counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. The death, that rotting flash, the human clay looked disgusting. Death takes away vanity. And even though he wanted the state of death, he was afraid like a virgin of the act. He would have liked death to come with due warning, so that he could prepare myself. For taking a look around at the little he would be leaving.
And one more moment when he contradicted himself was when Fw, writing a letter to his wife, mentioned that losing Phuong would be beginning of his death. He was afraid of Phuong’s leaving him. He wanted death, but not that kind of. He just didn’t want to be alone in his last decade. When he and Pyle were trying to escape death hiding in the rice field and Fw thought if he faint he would drown and he had always hated and feared the thought of drowning. But he himself founds an excuse that he escaping death avoids the loved thing, coquetting with it, like a woman who demands to be raped by her lover.
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