Conrad short stories

In "Amy Foster", Joseph Conrad has written a great story that shows the different types of love felt between Amy and Yanko.
An unnamed narrator recalls a time several years earlier, when he was staying with his friend Kennedy, a country doctor in the English coastal village of Colebrook, near Brenzett. One day as he accompanied the doctor on his afternoon rounds, they came upon a dull-looking woman named Amy Foster, who was hanging out her wash. Kennedy asked after her son's health. As he continued his rounds, he told the narrator about this woman's recent life.
Although Kennedy agreed that the woman looked passive and inert, he confided that this same woman once had enough imagination to fall in love. The oldest child of a large family, Amy was put into the service of the Smiths, the tenant family at New Barns Farm, where she worked for four years. Meanwhile, she occasionally made the three-mile walk to her family's cottage to help with their chores. As Kennedy explained, Amy seemed satisfied with this drab life until she unexpectedly fell in love.
After the narrator and Kennedy passed a sullen group of men trudging along the road, Kennedy resumed his story, this time telling about a man who used to walk the village paths with such a jaunty, upright bearing that Kennedy thought he might be a woodland creature. The man was an emigrant from central Europe who had been on his way to America when his ship went down near the coast. He could speak no English, but Kennedy guessed that he had boarded the ship in Hamburg, Germany. When the castaway first appeared in Brenzett, his wild language and appearance shocked the town. Taking him for a gypsy, the milk-cart driver lashed him with his whip and boys pelted him with stones. The man ran to New Barns Farm, where he frightened Mrs. Smith. Amy Foster, however, responded with kindness. Though Mr. Smith thought that the man's wild appearance and indecipherable speech proved that he was a lunatic, Amy implored the Smiths not to hurt him.
Several months later, reports of the shipwreck appeared in newspapers. The emigration agents were exposed as confidence men who had cheated people out of land and money. Townsfolk speculated that the German may have floated ashore on a wooden chicken coop. At New Barns, he showed his appreciation for Amy's kindness by tearfully kissing her hand. The castaway's nightly thoughts returned to Amy Foster, who had treated him kindly. Eventually, the stranger learned a few words of English. One day he rescued Swaffer's infant grandchild from a pond into which she had fallen.
Yanko began his courtship of Amy with a present of a green satin ribbon, and he persisted in spite of the warnings and threats of the townspeople. After Yanko asked for Amy's hand, Mr. Swaffer gave them a cottage and an acre of land—the same land that Kennedy and the narrator passed during their rounds—in gratitude for saving his granddaughter from drowning.
After Amy bore Yanko's son, Yanko told Kennedy about problems that he was having with Amy. One day, for example, she took their boy from his arms when he was singing to him in his own language. She also stopped him from teaching the boy how to pray in his own language. Yanko still believed that Amy had a good heart, but Kennedy wondered if the differences between them would eventually ruin their marriage.
After breaking off this story, Kennedy said that the next time he saw Yanko, the man had serious lung trouble brought on by a harsh winter. When Kennedy treated Yanko, he was lying on a couch downstairs, suffering from fever and muttering in his native tongue. Kennedy asked Amy to move Yanko upstairs to get him away from the drafty door, but she refused. Kennedy saw fear in her eyes but had to leave to treat his other patients. That night Yanko's fever worsened. Perhaps thinking he was speaking in English, he demanded water, but Amy could not understand him. As his demands increased in intensity, she took her child to her family's farm three miles away.
The tragedy of Yanko Goorall probes the modernist theme of isolation and alienation. This idea also figures prominently in Joseph Conrad's major works. Yanko is an unwilling loner whose free and easy nature undergoes repeated assaults until even the only person who has offered him love abandons him at the moment of his greatest need. His first ordeal was physical confinement in crowded trains, the boxlike berths aboard a ship, and the dungeon like lodge at New Barns.
Kennedy senses, however, that Yanko's most painful ordeal is his verbal and psychological confinement. He notes that “an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sunshine. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody.” The story repeatedly contrasts Yanko's nobility with the prejudice and insensibility of the townspeople, whose rejection intensifies his feelings of estrangement. Amy's father, for example, opposed Yanko's marriage partly because he heard him mutter to himself in his native language. Told by Kennedy that Yanko was dead, the father responded with indifference: “I don’t know that it isn’t for the best.”

The story is about an unfortunate family who has seen some of the most tragic incidents in time. In this story a concept of idiot child has been introduced. Its a condition in which child is inert to every feeling and sensation. The child doesn’t recognize its own parents, or develops any skills or intelligence. The family is an agrarian family which feeds itself from the crops it is able to sell. Jean is the only son in the family. He grows young and marries a beautiful woman Susan. In the beginning everyone is happy about the communion of the two but tragedy soon strikes. Their first children are twins and soon the couple realizes that both of them are idiot. They don’t cry, aren't playful and dont indulge in any other activity what so ever. Susan is humiliated in the society and is nicknamed the idiot mother. Jean is tense not only about the fact that his children are idiot but more so about the fact that his agricultural lands would fall into somebody elses hands as his own children weren't capable of working as farmers. Jean and Susan subsequently decide to have another child. It was a boy and he also turned out to be idiot. The muteness in the activities of the idiot children is brought out tellingly in the story. The grief is generally accompanied by enormous ridicule from the society. Seeing this Jean who is an atheist converts. Jean still doesn't lose hope and tries for another child. This time its a girl, and Jean is able to reconcile himself that he might be able to marry her to a sound and able-bodied man who would then take care of his fields. But the girl is also an idiot. Jean is enraged and questions the very womanhood of Susan and how was she able to keep producing children who were stupid. Susan is put through enormous stress and torture until a time when she is not able to take it anymore. One day Jean once again physically assaults his wife but this time in reaction his wife thrusts a pair scissors into Jeans throat, He falls on the floor and dies. Tragedy follows yet again when ghost of her deceased husband haunts her and she horrified gets herself in a tricky situation and dies in an accident, The story is basically about grief and also that how if one doesn't stand up to the situation fate has to offer it can become a cause of his own peril. Also its a bad example of parenting because it seems that they both give up on their children as soon as they see signs of them being idiot. The story also ends in a sad not when the children are transferred to their grandparents who then selves are finding hard to get by in their life, and the plot is given to some random catholic who is unrelated to the family.

The story runs in the background of anarchism against established social order that existed in Europe in 18th century and of the revolutionary activities that were taking place at that time.

The author writes about a man, very tastefully named Mr. X, who collects a very rare and exquisite form of collectables - temperaments and behavior of extremely well known, famous and wealthy people, people who are respected in their fields of work, rather almost every one who is worth knowing for their work. The author himself is Chinese porcelain collector. But in the course of the novel the author writes about the enigmatic persona of this Mr. X in a way that it makes you wonder whether the author himself has started to play the role of Mr. X by writing the story about his acquaintance Mr. X (as Mr. X was supposed to be man who would notice the personalities of people he met).

Mr. X was also a revolutionary writer, writer of anarchism, essentially an anarchist himself. On their last encounter Mr. X recounts a breath-taking incident in his life as a revolutionary activist. Mr. X was asked to visit London once by his revolutionary friends as many of the plans that had been hatched in their London head office had gone wrong, awry and police had smoothly arrested and intercepted the revolutionist movements. It was suspected that there was a mole in the London chapter of revolutionary activities.

Mr. X understood the predicament in which he was in as soon as he reached there. Because not only was it important to find the mole in the organization but it was also important not to create an atmosphere of suspicion and down the motivation and raging enthusiasm of some of the true activists working from there.

The hideout was a pretty ideal place for activities. It was in a rather well known and respected street. The hideout was the house of a government official, or rather it was house of his daughter and son, a perfect cover for such a place. When Mr. X went there he met the owner of the house (daughter). She was a woman, who would put a great effort into exerting her own individuality, but then that was the case for every woman, but this woman was not afraid to go to extreme measures to be a part of the anarchist movement and yet make herself visible and do things in her own way. She had a comrade Sevrin and the person in-charge of the entire London operation was Horne, a true revolutionist. It was very clear that she was in love with Sevrin by the intense and earnest conversations that they would indulge themselves into. Mr. X planned a sham police raid into the hideout and it was expected that the mole would chicken out or at least show less adverse reactions and maintain calm. During the course of the raid Mr. X is not able to find out the real mole, all the revolutionists tried to escape and adopted extreme ways of running away, a few of them even threatened to blow up the entire building and just as the operation was about to go bust, the daughter owning the house came in and Sevrin ordered the sham police to take woman out of the house to safety and then continue their raid, effectively exposing him as the mole. When he was exposed he admitted to his real identity of being a police spy, and as it turned it was his love for the woman that lead his guard down and forced him out. Even so till the end he remained anti-revolutionist and maintained full conviction in his cause.

The story turned out to be a love story which had everything in it, secrets, love, deceit and tragedy. But Mr X had completed his job, which was where he ended his story. The author never met Mr. X ever again but admired the man as someone who was unique, firm and a rare jewel for his ideology, beliefs, experience and intelligence.

Abhishek Bhatnagar

2007EE10314