We know only that Pyle is dead and that a police investigation is underway. The narrator, Fowler, is a seasoned British war correspondent, proud of the detachment that is essential to his profession. We know nothing of this as the novel commences.
He is absolutely sincere his motivations entirely honourable. Arriving in Vietnam as an undercover CIA agent, it is his mission to establish that Third Force. Pyle is the eponymous quiet american young, naive and a firm believer in the political ideology of York Harding who advocated the establishment of a third force as a stabilising alternative to Communism and colonialism. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.
(Pyle) was absorbed already in the Dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West he was determined … to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. It’s hard to believe but when I first read The Quiet American (about 12 years ago) I completely missed the point! So much water has flowed under the political bridge since then that it would nigh on impossible to do that now.
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