Quixote Rides Again: Illusion And Delusion In Conrad's Tale

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Don Quixote Rides Again: Illusion and Delusion in Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Tale “‘You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That’s what you are.’” (Conrad 1946b, 44) Fifteen-year-old Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) heard these admonitory words from the lips of his tutor, a Krakowian college student instructed by his maternal uncle (Tadeusz Bobrowski) to talk his nephew out of his eccentric desire to become a seaman. The link between young Conrad’s desire to become a sailor and the renowned knight of La Mancha is not a casual one. In his writings, Conrad generalises the particular case of his vocation for the sea by pointing to the reading of romances of adventure as the cause prompting young men to join the maritime profession. Thus, for instance, …show more content…

Jim persist in this illusory logic, which is at odds with the reality principle. His prototype is Don Quixote: “No adventure ever came to one for the asking. He who starts on a deliberate quest of adventure goes forth but to gather dead-sea fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the gods and great amongst heroes, like that most excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha. By us ordinary mortals of a mediocre animus that is only too anxious to pass by wicked giants for so many honest windmills, adventures are like visiting angels. They come upon our complacency unawares.” (Conrad 1946a, 155-56) 4 See Conrad (1946c, 23-24, 241, 246, 293 and 325) for other instances of this refrain-like phrase. 5 Not knowing at this point the tragic outcome of the story, Marlow somehow tempers the connection between Jim’s mind and intoxication by saying immediately afterwards: “I found him, if not exactly intoxicated, then at least flushed with the elixir at his lips.” (Conrad 1946c, 175) 6 See A Personal Record (1946a, 92); Nostromo (1947, 379); and Conrad’s letter to Edward Garnett of March 15, 1895 (1983,

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