Lawrence Graver - An Outpost of Progress [Conrad's Short Fiction]

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(10) Like Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, "Outpost" is an ironical study of human vulnerability, especially among those who belong to what Conrad liked to the fellowship of the stupid, the lazy, and the ineffectual.

(11) Out is a work of ruthless belligerence, its interest rests less in the people than in the quality of the narrator's attack.

- incapable of independent thought

(12) The use of irony to expose the transparent postures of the fat Kayerts and the thin Carlier closely resembles Flaubert's choice of weapon and victims in Bouvard et Pecuchet, a classic revelation of bourgeois stupidiry and pretension. [두 사람이 책을 읽는 장면은 플로베르의 소설의 영향이 크게 보임.] (플로베르에 대한 콘래드의 찬사와 영향 - Jocelyn Baines 전기 145-48)

- (작품 도입부에 대한 평) But in addition to the bare facts of case, enough negative criticism is conveyed through the narrator's tone of voice to support Garnett's complaint that human interest is forfeited from the begining.

- two patterns of irony

1. the simple contrast based on a physical or moral reversal. Makola is neat, taciturn, and unflappable

slovenly white superiors are easily moved to tears of suspicious enmity.

(director의 표면적인 말과 속내의 차이에도 주목) 

2. a blunt form of rhetorical irony reminiscent of Kipling in his Indian stories. (머콜라를 소개할 때 마지막 부분에서 생뚱맞게 evil spirit을 언급한 것. Kipling - The Man Who Would Be King 등에서 사용한 기법)

(13) Among the people in literature who deserve attention the first is Rudyard Kipling (1898년 사촌에게 보낸 편지)

- Toward the end of his career, Conrad took a strong dislike to Kiplind's politics and to his journalist vivacity; but in the early days, he felt that in comparison with other fiction of the period Kipling's "ebauches appear ... finished and impeccable."

- 식민지에 있는 영국인들이라는 점에서 두 사람 작품의 필연적 공통점.

- [The Man과 이 작품의 공통점] the breakdown of two European egoist who had hoped to get rich quickly in a primitive society, and both end with scenes of slaughter and crucifixtion.

(14) These jokes and predictable contrast mirror Conrad's self-delight, for they appear with little variation on every page of the story. Yet the broadness of this irony might be excusable, if it were not for a half dozen passages of reflection in which points already established through action or irony are repeated in candid expository prose. The pattern is typical: first, a brief description of a scene; then, a long, self-evident stretch of generalized, repetitive commentary. The brevity of one matched by the banality of the other makes development of an idea or a dramatic action impossible.

 Static and derivative, Out reveals a writer handling materials that he has not yet made his own.

[이 글의 필자도 이 작품을 비판] 

(15)"My thought," he once told Garnett, "is always mulitple."

- the movement in his next tales would have to be away from directness and simplicity, a pursuit of exemplary situations in which moral patterns become increasing more intricate. The main technical problem would be to find the most satisfactory distance from the melodramatic events of the story.