“Sooner or later, One has to take sides if one is to remain human.”
If ‘taking sides’ means becoming emotionally involved in human conflicts and being prepared to suffer, then The Quiet American can be read as an argument for the necessity of becoming involved. Fowler, the character who suffers from the dilemma of whether or not to take sides, manages to remain detached for a long period, yet he is forced out of his inertia when events become too important for him to ignore and he realizes that inaction also has consequences.
Both Mr Heng and Captain Trouin tell Fowler that he cannot avoid becoming involved, in two short but key scenes near the end of the text. When Fowler travels north to report on the war and recover from his loss of Phuong, the captain responds to Fowler’s usual statement of non-engagement with, ‘One day something will happen. You will take a side’ and ‘We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out’. This scene anticipates Fowler’s decision to become involved in both the war and in life when he resolves that Pyle has got to be stopped. Trouin refers specifically to emotion as the trigger for involvement and Heng expands on this when he makes the statement quoted in the essay question. These characters seem to be arguing that emotional engagements part of being human, suggesting that Fowler has become so removed from his own feelings that he is at risk of becoming less human, a kind of empty shell of a man.
