I need help writing a Précis for the novella called, The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
Use the following information to help:
Joseph Conrad – Biography
Childhood –
Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (1857-1924)
Born in Poland, then a part of Russia.
Parents were exiled from Russia fighting for Poland’s independence. (Ewa and Apollo)
Conrad almost died from pneumonia. Mother died of tuberculosis and Conrad was shuffled between his father and family relations.
He was a sickly child who suffered from nervous attacks and headaches that were epileptic in origin. Sickness remained throughout his entire life.
Father died when he was eleven.
Raised now by maternal grandmother and his Uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski who saw to his education. Had a profound influence on his life.
Conrad was not a great student but read a lot of romances and adventure stories.
He developed from his readings, a romantic view of the sea. He wanted to become a sailor.
Sea Life –
In 1874, he attended a marine school in Marseilles. The rest of his schooling was spent aboard ships on voyages to the West Indies as an apprentice seaman and steward. He may have been involved in gun smuggling.
Many of the men he came into contact with became the characters or part of his characters for his novels.
He led a rebellious life – romancing with older women and accumulated huge gambling debts.
Because of his debts he attempted suicide in 1878 and survived.
Later that same year, he signed on to an English steamer and sailed under Britain for sixteen years. He was twenty years old and this is where he learned how to speak English. English was not his first language.
He became a British subject in 1886. His nickname was “Polish Joe”. He later changed his name to Joseph Conrad.
Congo –
1890 Job as commander of a Congo river steamboat. This time in Africa introduced him to European imperial ideology and colonization. (The Scramble for Africa)
His goal for that trip was to rescue an agent of the company, Georges Antoine Klein (an influence for Kurtz character in Heart of Darkness)
There he suffered fever, dysentery. His health depleted further.
His outrage and condemnation of colonialism were well documented in his journal, the Congo Diaries.
Heart of Darkness –
In 1895 he started to write Heart of Darkness, his more famously know work. He later wrote The Secret Sharer in 1909. (You may note if you have a print copy that both of these texts are included together).
Writing for him was slow and painful. Getting paid was the only way he could write faster.
He developed recurring writing techniques:
Flashback.
Flashforward.
Juxtaposition. (to place things side by side, putting close together, combination of ideas)
He married Jessie George in 1896.
He had two children, Borys (1898) and John (1906).
Conrad’s income always remained small but his reputation grew. Some of his friends:
Ford Madox Ford.
Steven Crane.
H.G. Wells.
Bertrand Russell.
Henry James (his idol)
In 1910, he was awarded a small pension. His novel “Chance” became a bestseller.
He didn’t like awards, and he refused knighthood in May 1924. He did, however, have a longing to win the Nobel Prize.
While working on his novel “Suspense” he died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924. He was 66.
Also read the following article below and write a Précis from the information:
Introduction to The Secret Sharer
The Conrad Centennial in 1957 brought new and deserved attention to the works of this Polish-English writer who created not only the spell of faraway places but also the drama of man’s search for identity and confidence in an indifferent or even hostile world. The Secret Sharer, written in 1909 but not published until 1912, carries both these Conrad trademarks in its compact story of a young captain’s ordeal in the Gulf of Siam on board a British sailing ship.
Although there is some disagreement among critics on whether The Secret Sharer is a short novel or a long short story, there is no disagreement about its excellence. For our purposes, The Secret Sharer is a short novel that reveals in miniature Conrad’s imaginative genius and technical perfection.
Conrad, usually pessimistic about his own writing, said of The Secret Sharer in a letter to a friend, “Every word fits, and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck, my boy! Pure luck!” Critics agree that there is not a single uncertain note in the story, but they credit its perfection not to luck but rather to Conrad’s painstaking way with words and to his magnificent technique.
Conrad is fascinated with words and their power. In “A Familiar Preface,”(McFee, p 665) he declares, “Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world”. This very love of words has brought attacks from certain critics. They say that Conrad uses three adjectives instead of one, that his sentences are too long and involved, and that he uses too many similes – all of which make for slow reading. These characteristics are found in many of his stories but not in The Secret Sharer, a concise, polished work. However, even The Secret Sharer should be read slowly, precisely because so much is packed into it.
In another of his famous prefaces Conrad says, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (Conrad, p 82). In The Secret Sharer, Conrad makes you hear the light footfall, and makes you see the furtive exchange of glances between two officers after a strange order or unusual action of the captain.
Conrad limits his novels to one significant phase or segment of life or character and reveals it by carefully selected experiences. A great difference between Conrad’s type of novel and more loosely constructed ones is in the management of plot. A Conrad novel sacrifices the freedom and sweep that Dickens, for example, has, in order to secure a tighter, more disciplined effect. In his effort to focus attention on the young captain’s inner conflict and development, Conrad eliminates all unnecessary information. Throughout The Secret Sharer, the relationship between the captain and the fugitive dominates the outward, adventure-tale aspects of the story.
The qualities of restraint and discipline in Conrad’s work were ones evidently commented upon by critics of his own time. In the preface to an autobiographical work, he once wrote:
It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts….
My answer is that…there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant…. … I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility – innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on stage above the pitch of natural conversation – but still we have to do that (Conrad, pp 667-668).
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In letters to his friends, Conrad revealed that he disliked being called a novelist of the sea. He uses the sea as background for many of this stories because he knows it so well, but his hero is never the sea. His hero is man in conflict with himself. Conrad never makes the mistake of thinking that interesting adventures of the sea or of anything else will make up for uninteresting characters. His stories are focused on men, usually young men, who encounter personal crises that probe their weaknesses and test their consciences. In Conrad’s world, disaster a step behind success. Some of his men win their battles; others lose them. But even in defeat, his men achieve a moral victory of sorts. They pass from isolation and insecurity to awareness and recognition of their relationship to the outside world.
Although Conrad bridges the 19th and 20th centuries, his stories, concerned with an outer world of exotic lands and eastern seas and ships that sailed these seas, and an inner world alive with men’s fears and loyalties and strengths and weaknesses, belong to the 20th century. The Secret Sharer is such a story.
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