His stories are
not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and
undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each
protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his
helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster,
leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely
recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain
Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all
they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible
forces that beset them.
Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The Shadow Line," superficially stories
of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing
sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the
surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the _Nan-Shan_ to port at last, but it
is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more
than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting
one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one
of disdain, almost one of contempt.
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