Unquiet Americans: Paul Theroux's Saint Jack and the Re-Vision of Graham Greene

£6.99

Symbiosis 2.1 75-90
Author: Thomas G. Olsen
Pages: 17

'Unquiet Americans: Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack and the Re-Vision of Graham Greene' by Thomas G. Olsen, explores the intertextual connections and thematic contrasts between Paul Theroux's 'Saint Jack' and Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American.' Originally published in Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, this essay examines how Theroux reinterprets Greene's critique of American expansionism in Southeast Asia through the lens of a different kind of American protagonist. Olsen delves into themes of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the moral complexities of American influence, providing a rich comparative study that bridges mid-20th-century British and American literature. This scholarly work is essential for those interested in literary criticism, transatlantic literary studies, and the evolving narratives of American foreign policy in literature.

Essay Excerpt

"Despite being one of Paul Theroux’s best early novels, and despite its direct engagement with American military and economic influence in Southeast Asia, Saint Jack (1973) remains largely unnoticed by critics concerned with the relation between American fiction and U.S. global expansion. Theroux’s only partly fictional Singapore emerges as a laboratory for reading the United States’ presence in the newly decolonized Malay peninsula, and, more generally, for measuring a monumental shift in a region moving slowly and often awkwardly out of the period of the colonial Pax Britannica and abruptly, sometimes brutally, into the period of the Asian Pax Americana that the Vietnam War was to have secured. In addition, however, Saint Jack raises important questions about the nature of inter-textual allusion and ideological appropriation because Theroux rewrites—and thus also re-envisions—Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) so as to posit an essentially benign American entrepreneurial capitalism that operates independently of both the European colonial and American neo-colonial abuses Greene describes in his highly influential novel."