Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories
Описание книги
This carefully crafted ebook: «Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories – Includes the Original Publication of Heart of Darkness + the Author's Note» is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. «Youth» is an autobiographical short story by Joseph Conrad. Written in 1898, it was first published in Blackwood's Magazine, and included as the first story in the 1902 volume Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories. This volume also includes Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether, stories concerned with the themes of maturity and old age, respectively. «Youth» depicts a young man's first journey to the East. It is narrated by Charles Marlow who is also the narrator of Lord Jim and Chance. The narrator's introduction suggests this is the first time, chronologically, the character Marlow appears in Conrad's works (the Author comments that he thinks Marlow spells his name this way). Similar to Joseph Conrad's better-known Heart of Darkness, Youth begins with a narrator describing five men drinking claret around a mahogany table. They are all veterans of the merchant navy. The main character, Marlow, tells the story of his first voyage to the East as second mate on board the Judea. The story is set twenty-two years earlier, when Marlow was 20.
Оглавление
Joseph Conrad. Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories
Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories - Includes the Original Publication of Heart of Darkness + the Author’s Note
Table of Contents
Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories
Author’s Note
Youth. Table of Content
Heart of Darkness. Table of Content
Heart of Darkness/Section I
Heart of Darkness/Section II
Heart of Darkness/Section III
The End of the Tether
The End of the Tether/I
The End of the Tether/II
The End of the Tether/III
The End of the Tether/IV
The End of the Tether/V
The End of the Tether/VI
The End of the Tether/VII
The End of the Tether/VIII
The End of the Tether/IX
The End of the Tether/X
The End of the Tether/XI
The End of the Tether/XII
The End of the Tether/XIII
The End of the Tether/XIV
Отрывок из книги
Joseph Conrad
e-artnow, 2021
.....
“Yes; that was the first thing we did—trim the yards of that wreck! No one was killed, or even disabled, but everyone was more or less hurt. You should have seen them! Some were in rags, with black faces, like coal-heavers, like sweeps, and had bullet heads that seemed closely cropped, but were in fact singed to the skin. Others, of the watch below, awakened by being shot out from their collapsing bunks, shivered incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It’s my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they might be charred down below. It was nearly calm, but a long swell ran from the west and made her roll. They might go at any moment. We looked at them with apprehension. One could not foresee which way they would fall.
“Then we retreated aft and looked about us. The deck was a tangle of planks on edge, of planks on end, of splinters, of ruined woodwork. The masts rose from that chaos like big trees above a matted undergrowth. The interstices of that mass of wreckage were full of something whitish, sluggish, stirring—of something that was like a greasy fog. The smoke of the invisible fire was coming up again, was trailing, like a poisonous thick mist in some valley choked with dead wood. Already lazy wisps were beginning to curl upwards amongst the mass of splinters. Here and there a piece of timber, stuck upright, resembled a post. Half of a fife-rail had been shot through the foresail, and the sky made a patch of glorious blue in the ignobly soiled canvas. A portion of several boards holding together had fallen across the rail, and one end protruded overboard, like a gangway leading upon nothing, like a gangway leading over the deep sea, leading to death—as if inviting us to walk the plank at once and be done with our ridiculous troubles. And still the air, the sky—a ghost, something invisible was hailing the ship.
.....