Illusion and Delusion in Conrad’s Lord Jim : A Tale Essay -- Joseph Co

Don Quixote Rides Again Illusion and Delusion in Conrads Lord Jim A TaleYou atomic number 18 an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. Thats what you are. (Conrad1946b, 44) Fifteen-year-old Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) heard theseadmonitory words from the lips of his tutor, a Krakowian college student instructed byhis maternal uncle (Tadeusz Bobrowski) to talk his nephew out of his eccentric desire to begin a seaman. The link between young Conrads desire to become a sailor and therenowned knight of La Mancha is not a fooling one. In his writings, Conrad generalisesthe particular case of his vocation for the sea by pointing to the reading of romances ofadventure as the cause prompting young men to join the marine profession. Thus, forinstance, in the autobiographical work in which the words of dear tutor are quoted (APersonal Record) Conrad refers to Victor Hugos Toilers of the Sea as his first understructure to the sea in literature. (1946b, 72) In Tales of the Sea (1898) anea rlier piece written at a period in which he was already engaged in the composition ofLord Jim A Tale Conrad speaks of how Frederick Marryat and James FenimoreCooper, the creators of sea fiction, influenced so many lives and gave to so many theinitial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career. (1949, 56) Later essays like WellDone (1918) or Geography and Some Explorers (1924) highlight the role played byromances and books of exploration in triggering young mens desire for a life ofadventure at sea, Conrads included. In the latter he calls Nez de Balboa, Tasman,Torres, misrepresent or Franklin the first grown-up friends of my early boyhood and statesthat their nautical feats were an inspiration for him. ... ...Facts They demanded facts for him Jim, as if facts could explainanything (Conrad 1946c, 29) This disavowal of the value of facts sounds is an anomalous one to hearcoming from a third-person teller which, traditionally, was supposed to occupy the objective position of avie w from nowhere specifically. It is important to add that such a statement is made in Chapter 4, at the endof which the third-person narrator gives the floor to Marlow, a first-person narrator subjectively involved inthe story he is telling.11 Needless to comment on the inter-group communication between hepatic diseases and alcoholism.12 It may be argued that the doctors irony and laughter are a sign of nervousness and a omen of the lossof consistency of his self-representation as derived from a scientific practice whose solidity is equallyeroded by the engineers atypical hallucinations.