A circular and blazing emptiness: The encounter with death in the novels of Joseph Conrad.
Item
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Title
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A circular and blazing emptiness: The encounter with death in the novels of Joseph Conrad.
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Identifier
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AAI9325121
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identifier
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9325121
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Creator
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Lindsey, Betty Coats.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Felicia Bonaparte
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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The preoccupation with death that characterizes Conrad's fiction is seen in the great number of his characters who die, his attention to the moment of death, his authorial commentary, and his imagery and metaphors. Death's presence overflows the requirements of the subjects and settings of the novels so as to constitute a major theme in itself. This death theme contributes to the difficulty of categorizing the novels generically as romantic, comic, satiric, or tragic. Their internal contradictions anticipate the literature of the Absurd, yet they resist a surrender to nihilism.;Conrad shows that the world his characters occupy is their own creation, engaged with the surrounding material world, yet possessing a greater 'reality' of its own. Both external and internal worlds are illusory, but, whereas the material world imposes the arbitrary closure of death, the imaginative consciousness of Conrad's characters provides an unlimited dimension of possibility that gives them the opportunity to 'save' themselves symbolically through personal myths of meaningfulness in which they use self-sacrifice as a paradoxical device of empowerment. The novels confront the reader with the epistemological problem of the validity of what may be reality to another mind.;Conrad's willingness to foreground the event of death to which all human values are irrelevant and yet not abandon those values in despair emerges as a defining characteristic of his unique vision. His emphasis on death is a willing appropriation of a fate that cannot be avoided so as to create a measure of control, a gesture of autonomy, a strategy that is reflected in those of his characters whose operational values structure the void, creating a human world out of nothing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
