Conrad's communities: The ethics of belonging

Mark William Bourdeau, Purdue University

Abstract

During his thirty years as a professional writer, Joseph Conrad explored the difficult processes whereby individuals attempt to establish identity through participation in ethical communities. Recognizing the obligation of institutions (politics, religion, marriage) to provide ethical guidance to a fragmented world, Conrad in his fiction, instead of extolling the virtues of successful communities, emphasized the dangers of intellectual and emotional isolation that inhibit their formation. For Conrad, creation of useful communities depends on potential members being able to voice their needs and beliefs in such a way that others can understand and then contribute to the formation of an ethically acceptable group. Thus the concept of voice (literal, metaphoric, narrative) charts the success or failure of the various communities portrayed in the novels. In Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, his first two novels, Conrad dramatizes the conflicts that occur when individuals who are non-native members of exotic societies undertake to build new communities for purposes of self-gratification. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus," he examines how a potentially successful community can be disrupted by individuals who refuse to alter their behaviour to fit the very needs that the community has been constituted to fulfill. Embodying narrative consciousness in Marlow in "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim, Conrad dramatizes the ambiguous ethical position of an individual who attempts to justify a participation in one community by making reference to other communities. In his "political novels"--Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes--he examines how obsession to private values precludes an individual's active participation in ethical communities. During his final phase, Conrad reworks much of his material as romance. Relying on allegory and symbolism in Victory, the most successful of the later novels, he stresses the need for the individual to commit fully to community as the chief means of combating pervasive evil dramatized in the figures of Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro. Throughout all these works, the message remains consistent. Those individuals who put the claims of self above those of ethical communities are doomed to fail. Although these individuals fail to achieve community, their need to verify the possibility of such communities is what makes them "one of us."

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

DeVitis, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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