Conrad`s resemblance to Marlow- The exile

Conrad's second exile was chosen by him when he was young. At the time it was not necessarily a long-term decision but in the event that is what it became, and it led directly to his first career: that of a seaman. As an orphan, who had moved about a good deal, Conrad was restless and somewhat rootless. He had been taken to the sea at Odessa, and that had fired his imagination; his father had begun to teach him French during their period in exile together, and those two factors fused in young Conrad's desire to escape and begin to form his own life and identity. He left Poland for Marseilles in 1874, at the age of sixteen, and the following year began his career as a sailor in the French Merchant …show more content…
Nevertheless Conrad always felt close to Polish troubles, and did revisit the country. When he died in Kent in 1924 the name Korzeniowski was inscribed on his gravestone.
No other major novelist of English literature had quite such a varied life. The experience of Conrad's first career, as a sailor, also marks him out from the mainstream of novelists in the canon of English literature in at least three basic ways: the length of his first career, its nature, and the world perspective it enabled Conrad to bring to English literature. (Spittles B. Joseph Conrad Text and Context)
3.4 Conrad as the first person …show more content…
Biographers such as Ian Watt, Frederick Karl and Norman Sherry tell us all that is likely to be learnt of Conrad’s actual experience in the Congo as well as of the historical originals of Kurtz, the parti-coloured harlequingarbed Russian and other characters in the novel. If parables are characteristically grounded in representations of realistic or historical truth, Heart of Darkness admirably fulfills this requirement of parable. But it fills another requirement too. Conrad’s novel is a parable because, although it is based on what Marx called ‘real conditions’, its narrator attempts through his tale to reveal some as-yet-unseen