" Or Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical
fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt." Or George Moore's
"Sister Teresa."
Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his
work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of
unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of
Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless
as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale
negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of
Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must
be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to
accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a
gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad "as a
comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common
war on despair." With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps argues
that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one
notion is as unsound as the other.
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