Amy Foster (Critical Analysis)

Joseph Conrad

Amy Foster

• A generalized comment on the lonely, uncomprehended, absurd human destiny, in which the castaway protagonist plays the role of an Everyman (Albert Guerard).

Amy Foster

• The central event of the narrative, which occurs off-camera – the wreck of a German ship carrying Central European immigrants to America – stands as a metaphor for geographical, cultural, and linguistic displacement, for the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.

Significant Points

• The American Dream

• Trauma

• Otherness

• Science

• Narrative Techniques

• Silence

Trauma

• Literary critics say that trauma must be viewed as a cultural trope AND a clinical concept.

• In Amy Foster, Conrad is aware of this psycho-cultural dimension of trauma, even if Yanko, his fictional victim, is not.

Four Depictions of Trauma

Four Depictions of Trauma

Four Depictions of Trauma

Four Depictions of Trauma

Otherness

• constitutes Conrad’s study of foreignness in English culture, an exposé of the insular nature of Great Britain

• Yanko is evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar

• Portrayal of Yanko being the Other depicts the villager as the real barbarians of the story

Science

• Exploratory in intent, each of his novels is a reapplication of scientific theory to the real world rendered in the novel. In this way, Conrad works towards a scientific understanding of the world.

Narrative Techniques

• Man as a story-telling animal (Alasdair MacIntyre)

• We all construe our sense of identity in terms of our role in the narrative we are part of.

• Presents the world of a universal observer,… representing the immediate epistemological experience, so the reader almost becomes the one experiencing the phenomena, just as the characters do (John Peters).

Narrative Techniques

• The narration of Amy Foster is calculated to shock his English reading public into a recognition of the limitations of their social codes and of their insularity

Silence

• The silence of Amy Foster is a very crucial component of the narrative. It is through her silence that we must define who she really is, rather than her speech.

• Her silence leads to the narrator’s objectification of her. This objectification reinforces the ‘authority’ of the narrator to define her.