Innocent Reporter?

          Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice-fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, “I hate war.” There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

            I put my earphones for Captain Trouin to speak to me. He said, “We sill make a little detour. The sunset is wonderful on the calcaire. You must not miss it,” he added kindly, like a host who is showing the beauty of his estate, and for a hundred miles we trialed the sunset over the Baie d’Along. The helmeted Martian face looked wistfully out, down the golden groves among the great humps and arches of porous stone, and the wounds of murder ceased to bleed. (Greene 150)

           

            This excerpt that I chose from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American has many aspects and nuances in this passage which touch on some of the concepts we have already discussed in lecture and section. Throughout the novel, Fowler presents himself as an “objective” reporter of the war who is just there to report what is happening as the French and U.S. forces try and maintain control of Indochina. Fowler, the voice and narrator of the story, paints himself in an unflattering light as a selfish opium user who constantly objectifies Phuong. Fowler also constantly stresses his English background throughout the novel in order to convey his innocence and distance himself form the war. In this passage, Fowler is actually a part of the violence that he tries to stay away but in this instance is caught up in the violence of a war his country is not even a part of (in the historical sense).

            Not only does this passage convey Fowler as having a direct tie to the violence being committed against the Vietnamese and put some of the blame on him, but it is also an instance of delayed decoding. Although this particular scene is not the most obvious example of delayed decoding in the narrative (for that is when Fowler constantly has no idea what the plastics or molds are for), it still is an instance in which Fowler has a brush with reality. His realization that he is actually a part of the violence in a war in which his country has no actual reason for being in Vietnam and therefore has no real reason for being there, he begins to question his own morality and how he is in fact implicated in the war. As the reader finds out more information about Fowler’s past with his infidelity, his desire to stay in Vietnam and his questionable actions, it becomes clear that Fowler is not an objective reporter of the war efforts at all nor an innocent witness to the atrocities of war, but instead just as at fault for the many Viet casualties as the army men who pull the trigger. 

-Meagan Davis