Homer Atkins’s ugliness, which makes him the “ugly American” of the novel’s title, symbolizes his practicality, humility, and excellent work ethic. Atkins attends a meeting in Vietnam with a number of French, American, and Vietnamese officials, all of whom are clean-cut and expensively dressed. Atkins, by contrast, is stocky, wears wrinkled khaki clothing with no tie, and his hands are scarred and blackened from years of manual labor and machine oil. Although Atkins feels out of place in such a setting, he is proud of his ugliness, particularly of his strong and ugly hands, since he’s made three million dollars with those hands and knows that he could make more. Atkins’s ugliness thus sets him apart from the other Foreign Service workers by signifying that he works with his hands and spends his time outside in the rural parts of Vietnam rather than in luxurious, clean mansions.
In the book, ugliness does not only apply to Atkins. When Atkins meets the Sarkhanese mechanic Jeepo, Atkins immediately likes him because he can see that Jeepo is as ugly as himself—Jeepo, too, is independent and practical and works with his hands to solve problems. This extension of ugliness to other characters and the novel’s title, The Ugly American, suggests that such “ugly” people—that is, people who aren’t afraid to dig in and get real work done and don’t care if they or their jobs look impressive on the outside—are precisely the type of people who should make up the Foreign Service, since they will be humble and work hard to solve real problems with real solutions.
Ugliness Quotes in The Ugly American
[Atkins’s] hands were laced with big, liverish freckles. His fingernails were black with grease. His fingers bore the tiny nicks and scars of a lifetime of practical engineering. The palms of his hands were calloused. Homer Atkins was worth three million dollars, every dime of which he had earned by his own efforts; but he was most proud and confident of his ugly strong hands. Atkins knew he could always make a living with them.
“You don’t need dams and roads […] Maybe later, but right now you need to concentrate on first things—largely things that your own people can manufacture and use. I don’t know much about farming or city planning or that kind of thing; but I can tell you that your people need other things besides military roads. You ever hear of a food shortage being solved by people building a military highway designed to carry tanks and trucks?”