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Can anyone tell me in detail or something about what type of writing did Joseph Conrad do?

2007-03-07 13:00:30 · 2 answers · asked by allen23bball 2 in Arts & Humanities Books & Authors

2 answers

Many (though by no means all) his books are set as stories of the ships and sailors of the British commercial navy and this theme (based on his experience as a Pole who worked his way up to officer in the British merchant navy) was what attracted his early readers.

But it would be a major error to see Conrad as a writer of sea stories just because much of what he wrote was set in this environment, with heroes who were young seamen or officers. Conrad is an early existentialist novelist (look up the meaning of existentialist). He's concerned with existence as defined by experience and what one makes of experience. His central theme is the way in which an individual, or a small group of men, deals with the challenge of existence through the experience of struggling against natural hazards, or man-made tyranny or other human disasters, and how they define themselves and shape their characters through such experience (or, as is the case in "Heart of Darkness", how someone is destoyed, and decays step by step, by letting the environment and the sitjuation in which they find themselves sap the character and the life out of them, until they become worse than the forces that they at one time hoped to master).

Conrad writes masterfully, and brings the traditional story-telling style to its highest form by exploiting the psychology and symbolism that is possible within the bounds of realism. His popullarity, which has periodically revived, seems to me to be based on the fact that everybody can find in Conrad the paradigm of a person meeting the challenges that face them in their daily life and in their living with danger and duty, whether in today's urban scene or in a more traditional danger zone (war, or struggling with nature like Conrad's seamen. Typically, Conrad's periods of rediscovery and rising popularity seem to coincide with times of war, from the Second World War (15-20 years after his death) onwards.

2007-03-07 13:15:25 · answer #1 · answered by silvcslt 4 · 1 0

I understand he did mostly adventure stories, particularly involving ships or far-overseas travel. "The heart of darkness" seems to be his most famous story (novel). He wrote in English, lwhich was not his native language. I think he was Scandinavian.
The recent movie "Apocalypse Now" was based on heart of darkness, transposing to the 20th century Vietnam War.

2007-03-07 13:11:07 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0 2

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