Struggling Against Terror and Despair
"He was menaced by this thing in the very source of his existence" (224).
Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907)
Points
for Reflection
J. Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), chps 12-13
- How should we class The Secret Agent, in terms of narrative modality?
- Do Ossipon and Winnie attain a greater intimacy than she and Verloc shared?
Compare the external (and internal) dialogue informing these interactions
across chapters eleven and twelve.
- Did Conrad implicitly support (190-93) Ossipon's terrified, "scientific" conclusion that Winnie is, like her brother, a "degenerate" (212, 217, 218)? What of the newspaper article's two options--which is the reader led to adopt as the appropriate explanation for Winnie's final actions, "madness" or "despair" (225, 226, 227)?
- Why might Conrad close chp. 12 with Ossipon instead of Winnie?
- Most of the characters we've met so far have not changed, per se, though
our understanding of them has expanded. Do Winnie and Ossipon interrupt
this trend? Do they change?
- Does the Professor cut an intimidating or pathetic figure in chapter
thirteen?
- Respond to the following issues or claims pulled from Ludwig Schnauder's essay "The Materialist-Scientific World View in The Secret Agent" (2007):
- does Winnie regress to a primordial, atavistic state as she kills her husband (Schnauder 99)
- does a scientific-materialistic approach--a social darwinist mode--indeed inform this novel throughout (Schanuder 98-101). Are there no moments of true altruism in the text? Does Conrad seem determined to suggest that we are all, upon cloose examination, bestial and bloodthirsty?
- Schanuder cites Hugh Epstein's claim that the novel contains moments that resist the ironic distance which characterizes so much of the novel (Schanuder 103). Identify such passages.
- "The Secret Agent consistently employs a materialist-scientific world view and, in contrast to its Victorian forebears, rejects any compromise with the remnants of the theological one" (104).
Impression, Sunrise (1874)
Claude Monet
Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu
