Heart Of Darkness

27 Pages 6726 Words

al writing for Marseilles and the sea, where, after three desultory years, he attempted a more definitive break with his past by shooting himself in the chest. Much later, in the different fiction of A Personal Record (PR) Conrad looks back at the boy Konrad and "the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself" and notes that there was "no precedent" for "a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations" (121, italics added). Konrad's departure from Poland has led critics to compare Conrad's Lord Jim's desertion of his ship, the Patna: "`"I had jumped ..." He checked himself, averted his gaze .... "It seems," he added'" (Lord Jim [LJ] 125). Marlow reports that Jim's "`references to "my Dad"'"--the pater with whom Jim will never have any further contact--gave the patriarchal image of "`about the finest man that had been worried by the cares of a large family since the beginning of the world'" (101). There was indeed among the overdeterminations of the real world a ship nam...