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What Is The View Of Youth Essay

Decent Essays

“Youth” is a short story written by Joseph Conrad who is an English short story writer. This piece of writing is inspired from real events of the writer’s life, specifically his first voyage to the East in 1881. It is an account of the voyage and the hardships encountered at sea in which the writer depicts the regressive state of the ship he is traveling in, and the uncooperative sea that would lead to the whole crew’s decay. This essay will study the ship, as a narrative space, from the narrator’s perspective, the effect it has on those on board who are determined to save it and how this space is affected by the wider space of the sea.
A quasi-present space in « Youth » is the ship that is meant to sail from London to the East. It is referred …show more content…

It prepares the reader for the ship’s inability to survive this long journey. In his article “Conrad's Youth: A Naive Opening to Art and Life”, Murray Krieger says: “speaking of the old ship, whose worn body cannot support the glorious dream of youthful enthusiasm, he clearly demonstrates her symbolic place in the theme: ‘Her youth was where mine is-where yours is-you fel- lows who listen to this yarn…’” From a temporal point of view the tense shuttles between two scales: the narrated past and the present story-telling time. In other words, being very old, the ship symbolically reinforces the theme of youth that revolves mainly around the narrator who does not fit in this space. In fact, his juvenility does not belong to this old space along with its crew of old men. Marlow’s youthful enthusiasm is echoed throughout the story that he tells; his restless desire to reach Bankok, his excitement about his first command and his determination are characteristics that distinguish him from the other old …show more content…

The natural elements that form this space, air and water, play an important role in determining the outcome of the story. Indeed, at some point of the story “there was nothing round the ship but the howl of the wind, the tumult of the sea”. The first trouble encountered on the voyage is “the famous October gale”. This strong wind repeatedly blows and destabilizes the ship that resists it. It represents a persisting unbeatable force of nature. Another important natural element is that of water. Travelling by a ship, water is an essential element to the space and a facilitator of movement. In this story, water turned into a threatening force that invades the space of the ship, reversing its function of crossing the sea without being attained by water. Water, this essential element of survival, turns into threat to the survival of Marlow and the whole ship. The sea is fighting to put down the ship that Marlow considers the only way to cross “the sea that gives nothing” and reach the East. The narrator, thus, acknowledges that the sea is not a welcoming space but can rather betray those who trust

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