Methods And Intentions: A Study Of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo As Modernist Fiction

Since its first publication in 1904, Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo has occasioned a large critical industry devoted to its interpretation and appreciation. Some critics have even related Conrad's Nostromo to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Indeed, Nostromo reads like an epic with its significant events, grand-scaled scenes and numerous characters. But not a few readers have complained that Nostromo is difficult to read, for its discontinuity, disorderly structure, and little description of characters but scattered color spots, and so on. In the opinion of the author of this thesis, the difficulty in Nostromo is just the magical point of the novel. Although the narrative of the novel can hardly go along with common readers' psychological expectation, it is an effective way to present the author Conrad's modern point of view in his work. The aim of this thesis is to understand Conrad and his modernist fiction Nostromo more deeply based on a study of both the content and narrative techniques in Nostromo, from a perspective of exploring the modernist features or methods in the novel and the author's possible intentions within.To start with, the thesis offers an introduction to the author Joseph Conrad, some features of his fiction, the rise of literary modernism, and a brief summary of the story of Nostromo. A large space of the thesis is then devoted to exploring the modernist features in content and narrative techniques in Nostromo and the author's possible intentions.In respect of content, themes, subject matter and characters are taken into consideration. A tinge of a tragic historical philosophy of determinism, a theme common in modernist fiction, can be perceived: man's every effort is futile, and any progress in society is merely an illusion. Conrad's modernist point of view is also clearly shown through the selection of subject matter of the novel. In Nostromo, the author's primary concern is not the events themselves but the mental processes ofcharacters in the novel, demonstrating the tendency of shifts of interest from the perceived to the perceiver, from the outside world to the inner world in modernist fiction. Different from traditional novel, in Nostromo there is no real hero or real victor. What Conrad may intend to expose is the sharp contrast between the outward appearance of the so-called heroes and their inward nature. Hence the traditional concept of hero is subverted.In terms of narrative techniques, shifts of time and shifts of narrative perspective are investigated. For many people, Nostromo is difficult to read, and the greatest difficulty may lie in Conrad's deliberate use of confusing time shifts in the novel, and in the course of narrating the author does not immediately tell his reader in a way with temporal clauses or other transitional words or phrases that signal where the forward or backward shifts of time begin and end. The root of using such confusing time shifts is that what the author is deeply concerned with is the effects of such a method, with the emphasis on the continuity of theme or the illumination of character that arises from the juxtaposition of non-sequential temporal events or scenes. Chronology in Nostromo is so disrupted that nothing is ever achieved at the end of the novel: we are virtually back where we start ?man's every effort is futile. Nostromo is also characterized by continual subtle shifts of narrative perspective, and free indirect speech is perhaps the most important means whereby such flexibility is attained. With the constant transitions of narrators, the story thus progresses forward, avoiding the impression on the reader of artificiality and dullness arising out of orderly arrangement of events or scenes. Due to different narrators' different or conflicting points of view, truth is thus constantly subverted. It seems that the author intends to tell his reader not to perceive history in a linear way.To conclude, in Nostromo, modernity can be perceived both in its content and narrative techniques, which entails the author's unique intentio...