"Postcolonial Triangles": An Analysis of Masculinity and Homosocial Desire in Achebe's A Man of the People and Greene's The Quiet American — Page 6:
26 I am not criticizing Achebe or Greene for the approach they employed in their novels, but I finally posit a general question in light of their methodology. Is there a way to represent the real and the hopeful ideal by utilizing triangulated desire to describe the postcolonial situation? While Achebe and Greene raise awareness of power structures, how might they have employed this literary device so that reality of patriarchal power is not just revealed, but a reversal could be invoked? By first recognizing the implications of triangulated desire in the postcolonial novel, critics can bring greater attention to both gendered problems in the postcolonial situation and the political structures that keep them in place. Perhaps then we can begin to address the larger challenge, and discover if love triangle is so imbedded in European, masculine tradition, that it cannot be decolonized at all?