European duplicity and an occidental passion : Graham Greene and the limits of cultural translation

Includes bibliographical references.With an eye to the historical situation in which the novel is set, and into which it emerges, I examine the text’s negotiation of the problems of communication and communicability across different languages and cultures. I suggest Greene as, in this sense, occupied with many of the same concerns about the limits of representation of personal experience as are found in the "Modernist" movement. This reading of the text also takes into account an historically contextualised overview of the various colonial interests the novel presents - those of the "old colonial peoples" of Europe as opposed to the new American empire. In this light, I am interested in the text’s depiction of the meeting of characters of different cultural origins - specifically the encounter of the European and the American, and the "Westerner" and the "Oriental" - in order to investigate the pitfalls of communication