Pyle, Fowler, and the Meaning of Love in The Quiet American
The Concept of Love in The Quiet American
In my opinion, neither Fowler nor Pyle knows what love is. Pyle fell in love with Phuong almost from the first time he saw her, but that isn’t love because he was only attracted to her body. Also, it’s important to know that it was the first time he was with a woman (he was inexperienced), so it was something new for him. He fell in love with a woman that he hardly knew, which represents an infantilization of love. What he actually felt was the desire to form a family and to have a wife, but he didn’t care who the wife was. His only objective was to achieve the prejudice of a good man of that time. I think that Pyle humiliated himself when he asked Fowler for help to steal his own girl (Phuong was initially with Fowler). Pyle said that he was bound to be with the girl because they shared common interests, as Phuong also wanted to get married and form a family. That’s the reason why, for Phuong, Pyle was just another man who had money, was able to support her, could give her a home, and buy her everything she wanted. He wasn’t special for her; she didn’t feel love. Pyle had an ethnocentric conception of love, as if it was his obligation to look after her because she is a poor “native.”
On the other hand, we have Fowler. He only worried about his loneliness and wanted to have a woman in his bed. We can see throughout the book how he refers to Phuong like an object and says several times that he only wanted her for sex and to look after her. Nevertheless, I consider that Fowler loves her more than Pyle did. For instance, he knows her habits perfectly and what she would be doing at any time; he worried about her when the bomb went off. In contrast, Pyle ordered that bomb to be set even though he knew that Phuong could get hurt or even could have died in that explosion.
Pyle: Innocence and Ideology
He is brave, romantic, and young (he’s 32 years old). He studied at Harvard University, where he started to read York Harding. He arrived in Saigon to be a reporter and competed with Fowler for Phuong’s love. Pyle’s ideals are based on the Third Force that York Harding celebrates. The Third Force is against communists and colonists. He believes that ideas are more important than lives, which is the reason why he conspired with General Thé to blow up buildings in Saigon. He didn’t care about the deaths; the victims of his terrorism aren’t human beings lost forever, they’re heroes for democracy. He defends his ideals fanatically and doesn’t care about the deaths he causes, creating chaos in order to establish democracy.
It’s true that Pyle has a noble ideal: innocence. He cheats himself because they have cheated him before. He reads York Harding and believes what he says without contrasting information. If we follow this dynamic, we could say that ISIS members are innocent too (but that isn’t the truth!).
Comparative Portrait: Pyle and Stephen Dedalus
As we know, Pyle is a well-educated guy who had a Catholic background, just as Stephen. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen starts with a personality which is similar to Pyle’s. But at the end of the book, this personality changes and starts being similar to Fowler’s (but there are differences because Stephen is more liberal and more romantic than Fowler). Stephen is much more mature at the end of the work, even though he has moments when he’s really fanatical. In the case of Stephen, he moves from religious discourse to artistic theory. Stephen decided to reject all socially imposed bonds and live freely as an artist. On the other hand, Pyle has a very Western conception of his life and is always trying to follow prejudices. For instance, Pyle has an ethnocentric conception of love. Also, Stephen undergoes several transformations over the course of the novel, whereas Pyle doesn’t change much; he’s a static character.