"Postcolonial Triangles": An Analysis of Masculinity and Homosocial Desire in Achebe's A Man of the People and Greene's The Quiet American

The love triangle is an excellent literary vehicle to represent the complexity of human desire. This paper explores two postcolonial works which employ this device, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. Although Greene's The Quiet American and Achebe's A Man of the People convey different views of the colonial and postcolonial situation, both works use the triangulated model of desire to create gender hierarchies in their novels that mirror the inherent power disjunction in the colonizer/colonized relationship.