The Ethics Of Joseph Conrad’s City Novels

Joseph Conrad is widely recognized as one of the most outstanding novelists in British literature and even the world literature. As a Polish-English writer, he encounters a number of problems the native writers will never undergo. As a transitional writer from the Victorian age to the Edwardian age, he has experienced great social changes and produced numerous philosophical ideas. As a result, Conrad seems to possess an acuter perspective to observe the world in comparison with his contemporaries and indeed he makes great contribution to the development of modern fiction. And one of his uniqueness from his contemporaries lies in his emphasis on the ethic values or moral concern of novels, which has exerted much influence on the later writers including T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald.Moreover, Conrad is a productive writer and his novels has been classified into three types, Sea novels which focus on Conrad’s adventures on the sea, Jungle novels which are set in the background of Malay Archipelago and African jungles, and Political novels which reflect on his political outlook. However, according to Professor Wang Songlin’s classification, the third type of Conrad’s novels Political novels should renamed as City novels. On the one hand, Conrad’s ultimate goal to create these novels is to explore the ethical issues in this world instead of the ostensible political problems. On the other hand, all these three political novels are set in cities so City novels can be inclusive of both the political and the ethical issues.Therefore, the name of City novels will be adopted in this thesis because this thesis intends to analyze the ethical values embodied in the City novels of Conrad, including Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.This thesis contains five parts. First of all, it relates Conrad’s life experiences, an brief literature review of Conrad and a brief presentation about the ethical criticism and Utilitarianism. Apart from these information, this part is a meticulous analysis of Conrad’s ethical context. Then, Chapter One mainly illustrate the personal ethics disclosed from the City novels. Chapter Two focuses on the analyzation of the family ethic. Chapter Three primarily deals with the political ethics. Finally, it concludes Conrad’s own ethical values in the light of the meticulous interpretation of his City novels by criticizing Utilitarianism ethics. First of all, Conrad emphasizes that as a moral man he has to be a responsible man whose responsibility can spread to himself, his family and even the society. Then, Conrad insists that a moral man must be an loyal man including the fidelity to other people, career, family, nation and the insistence on faith and honesty. Finally, Conrad holds that a moral man must possess a sympathetic heart, which is an effective way to cure people’s isolation and loneliness and lessen the tension in social relationships. In short, this thesis aims to display Conrad’s thematic concern of ethical values on the basis of ethical criticism and furthermore reminds us not to neglect the importance of morality even in our modern society oriented by the material interests.