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Phuong Hei
An enigmatic Vietnamese military commander, General Thé uses violence and cruelty to achieve his political aims, but it’s never made clear what these aims are. Thé becomes an object of great fascination for Alden Pyle, the young idealist who believes that Thé represents the Third Force prophesized by York Harding. In the end, Greene doesn’t explain to us whether Thé is a noble idealist, as Pyle thinks, or a brutal “bandit,” as Fowler suspects.
General Thé Quotes in The Quiet American
The The Quiet American quotes below are all either spoken by General Thé or refer to General Thé. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 3, Chapter 2, Section 1
Quotes
“We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learnt a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force—it comes out of a book, that’s all. General Thé’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.” It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight. “I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.” “Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like Thé. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.”
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General Thé Quotes in The Quiet American
The The Quiet American quotes below are all either spoken by General Thé or refer to General Thé. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 3, Chapter 2, Section 1
Quotes
“We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learnt a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force—it comes out of a book, that’s all. General Thé’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.” It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight. “I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.” “Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like Thé. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.”
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
