|
...
Biography of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large, fertile plain between Poland and Russia. ... Although his works were little known, they would have tremendous influence on his son
A year into the marriage, Eva became pregnant with Joseph, who was born in 1857. "Conrad" was actually a middle part of his name. ... The seven-year-old Conrad, who witnessed her decline, was absolutely devastated. ... At age eleven, Joseph was an orphan. ... Thus began the Cracow years, which ended when Conrad left Poland in 1874. ... By 1878, Joseph had made his way to England with the intention of becoming an officer of the British ships. ... Conrad would take voyages for a long period, and would then receive a rest time on shore. ... When he was not at sea, writing letters or in journals, Joseph was exploring other means of making money. Unlike his father, who practically abhorred money, Conrad was obsessed by it, and always on the lookout for business opportunities. ... Conrad remained in the English port of Mauritius for two months. ... It was here, in the summer of 1889, that Conrad began the crucial transition from sailor to writer by starting his first novel, Almayers Folly. ... All the time Conrad became closer and closer to Marguerite, an older family friend who was his closest confidant. ...
1894 was a landmark year for Conrad his first novel was published, he met Edward Garnett, who would become a lifelong friend, and he met Jessie George, his future wife. The two-year courtship between the 37-year-old Conrad and the 21-year-old Jessie was somewhat discontinuous. Conrad pursued other women in the first year of their relationship, but since they all rejected his advances, his attention was strongly focused on Jessie by the autumn of 1895. Garnett disapproved of the match, as Jessie was miles below Joseph in education and intellectual culture. ... Conrad had a true genius for companionship, and his circle of friends included talented authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James. ... By leaving these key elements of the story nameless, Conrad emphasizes that each of us has a dark side that we must confront at sometime on lifes path.
Analysis
A major theme that Conrad explores in the Secret Sharer is the relationship between the land and sea, elements that he also compares other places in his writing. On one hand, Conrad rejoices in the great beauty, serenity, and immensity of the sea, compared with the squalor, anxiety, and unrest of the land. ... Even before we meet his double, a motif that obviously addresses these inadequacies, Conrad lays the scene, again emphasized by the important physical description that begins the book. The captain sees, "two small clumps of tress, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the River Meinam we had just leftand, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest form the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon" The insignificant twin clumps of tress observed by the captain suggest the dyadic aspects of the captains personality, which Conrad develops fully in the double motif. ... "
In the first chapter, it is also important to note that in this story there are very few details or characters that are not essential to the allegory that Joseph Conrad is attempting to paint. ...
One of the key literary elements of this story is also the universal quality of the message that Joseph Conrad attempts to deliver. ...
In Reminiscences of Conrad (1924), novelist John Galsworthy recalls seeing Conrad for the first time, when Conrad was 36:
It was in March, 1893, that I first met Conrad on board the English sailing ship "Torrens" in Adelaide Harbour. ...
JOSEPH CONRAD (Teodor Josef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski) 1857-1924
Philip V. ... Wells, and Henry James, the British short story writer and novelist Joseph Conrad was born in Russian-occupied Polish Ukraine in 1857, the son of Polish aristocrat and militant nationalist Count Apollo Korzeniowski. ... When the boy was seven his mother died of tuberculosis; his father lived in exile until 1869, when Czarist authorities permitted him to move south; however, after that remove, when young Conrad was just eleven, his father died. ... As a member of the French merchant marine sailing out of Marseilles, young Conrad was implicated in a Carlist conspiracy to place the Duke of Madrid on the Spanish throne. After a suicide attempt, Conrad joined the British merchant service in 1878. ... In 1884, Conrad became a naturalized British subject and gained his masters certificate. ...
Primarily seen in his own time as a writer of boys sea stories, Conrad is now highly regarded as a novelist whose work displays a deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique. ... Throughout his fiction Conrad is concerned with moral dilemmas, the isolation of the individual to be tested by experience, and the psychology of inner urges in both groups and individuals. ...
Conrad did not find shore-life easy. ... After the publication of his first book, which had taken Conrad some five years to write (and which had survived the African jungle, shipwreck, and a Berlin railway cloakroom), Edward Garnett (writer, critic, and publishers reader) asked, "Why not another?" Gradually Conrad settled down to write for a living. ...
Conrad uses fiction to analyze the macrocosm (world at large) by presenting objectively and scientifically a microcosm such as a ships crew. As a young merchant sailor Conrad had been cut off from family, friends, and country; this essential loneliness he conveys in his tales set on the sea and in exotic locales. ... Conrad often maneuvers to keep the reader at a distance from the characters in order to view them objectively. ...
Here as elsewhere, the world is seen by Conrad as a place of unending contention between the forces of darkness and dissolution on the one hand and those of brotherhood, duty, and bravery on the other; this belief is sometimes referred to as Manichæism, an early Christian heresy. Conrad divides all mankind into two types--the visionaries (who are truly young no matter what their chronological age) and the cynical realists. Conrad implies that a man is already dead if he has lost his ideals and visions. ... Conrad shows how superficial are rational control and civilisation. ... A Readers Guide to Joseph Conrad .
Approximate Word count = 6841
Approximate Pages = 27.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
|
|
