Word: nostromo
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...adventures began when Conrad (real name: Teodor Joózef Konrad Korzeniowski), the orphaned son of Polish intellectuals, defied his guardian and went to sea at the age of 16. Nostromo, for instance, describes with photographic precision a revolution he witnessed in Central America while serving as an apprentice aboard a French barque carrying guns to the insurgents. The Nigger of the Narcissus narrates, day by day, a stormy voyage that Conrad once took around the Cape of Good Hope; the "nigger" was an old black seaman born a slave in Georgia who died at sea as he does...
Conrad has a pronounced socio-political ideology. It is never absent from the novels, but it is stronger in these three than elsewhere. Guerard, despite "my sympathy with the political vision" of Nostromo seems less interested in ideology than in the other components of novels. This is a great pity much of Conrad's ideology, for that brand of illiberalism is not going to find many commentators sympathetic enough to do it justice...
...concentrated, then, on the three short novels and five longer ones which are most congenial to his critical methods: "The Secret Sharer," "The Shadow Line," "Heart of Darkness," The Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. The method involves three great concerns--for prose style, for narrative technique and for the psycho-mythical element. The combination is not as confining as it sounds; a closely argued and integrated discussion of the first five novels cited above on these three bases covers them with commendable through-ness. Indeed, the chapters on Nigger and Lord...
...second to last section of Conrad the Novelist deals with the three political novels: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. It is not, I think, an impressive as the first two hundred pages; there are excellent passages, particularly in the Nostromo chapter, but Guerard does not always reach the high level he maintains in treating the other novels...
...standards of honor and fidelity, a dimming memory in men's minds. . . ." Marxian critics have found him "exotic" because he failed to write of factories; a perennial kind of plain, impatient critic has found his preoccupations morbid. The stories assembled in this volume, and the longer novels, Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, make both these accusations seem as irrelevant as the "dating" of Conrad's work. Neither time nor fashion really affects its nature, which is Sophoclean and tragic: "The plight of the man on whom life closes down...