Vietnam's 'mute register': the language barrier and the crisis of representation in G. Greene's novel 'The Quiet American'

the article is devoted to the analysis of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American (1955) as a work about the fundamental difficulty of understanding a foreign culture. The central focus of the research is the linguistic and cultural barrier between the Western characters and the Vietnamese reality, which is deliberately portrayed as an “unreadable” text. Through the character of Phuong and other Vietnamese figures, the writer demonstrates how their “muteness” and “impenetrability” to Western perception provoke the characters of Fowler and Pyle to forcibly impose their own projections and romanticized narratives onto them. The article argues that the conflict transcends political disagreements, becoming a metaphor for a crisis of representation and cognition. The genre structure of the novel is examined, where Fowler's narrative is revealed not only as a detective story but also as a confession addressed to an external listener-reader.

“The Quiet American”, Graham Greene, crisis of representation, intercultural communication, language barrier, colonial discourse, “mute register”, confession, Vietnam