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The Columbia History of the British NovelThe Marlow Tales Conrad was concerned with the dilemma of transforming the «freedom» of living in a purposeless world from a condition into a value. And Marlow enabled him to examine this dilemma in "Youth' (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900). Writing enabled Conrad to define his values and his character. He uses his narrators and dramatic personae to objectify his feelings and values. Marlow is a surrogate through whom Conrad works out his own epistemological problems, psychic turmoil, and moral confusion; his search for values echoes Conrad's. Thus he is a means by which Conrad orders his world. He is defining not only the form of the story but the relation between Conrad's past and present selves. The younger Marlow was explicitly committed to the same conventional values of the British Merchant Marine to which Conrad had devoted his early adulthood, but the mature Marlow has had experiences that have caused him to reevaluate completely his moral beliefs. That Marlow is a vessel for some of Conrad's doubts and anxieties and for defining the problems that made his own life difficult is clear not only from his 189 °Congo diary and the 1890 correspondence with Mme Poradowska, but even more so from the letters of the 1897 to 1899 period, selections from which have already been quoted ...» |
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