Joseph Conrad Through Africa : The Twilight of Modern Europe

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  • ジョゼフ・コンラッドのアフリカ : 近代ヨーロッパの黄昏
  • ジョゼフ コンラッド ノ アフリカ キンダイ ヨーロッパ ノ タソガレ

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Born to Polish parents in Russia in 1857,Conrad learned English, as is well known, while serving as a sailor, and his career as a sailor culminated when he took charge of a vessel in the Congo, Africa, which was then governed by King Leopold II. Later, when he looked back on the experiences there, he told one of his friends that he had been just a mere animal before the Congo. It might be easily presumed from this that the experiences had a decisive influence upon his life and thought thereafter. As Jean-Aubry wrote in a letter, "it may be said that Africa killed Conrad the sailor and strengthened Conrad the novelist." In this thesis I took up three materials : The Congo Diary which Conrad kept while in service there, and the two pieces that he later produced out of the experiences. The first one is An Outpost of Progress (1897), which focuses on the gradual decay and destruction of two ordinary persons who were transplanted from France to an outpost in deep Africa as if they had been tested in an animal experiment. And the second one is his true masterpiece, Heart of Darkness (1899). One of its characteristics is the introduction of a "dramatized narrator" called Marlow, by which Conrad succeeded in making a dismal and horrible story more plausible and receptive of a variety of interpretations. By a detailed "explication de texte" I tried to refute Albert Guerard's view about the causes of Kurtz's disintegration, and saw in his death the decline of the glorious modern Europe that overwhelmed the rest of the world by its ideals of progress, science and civilization. At the same time I interpreted the narrator Marlow as a man deeply imbued with a philosophical skepticism which characterized both the writer Conrad himself and the fin-de-siecle mood a hundred years ago.

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