Conrad, Joseph - J. H. Stape (essay date 1992)

J. H. Stape (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: Stape, J. H. “Conrad's ‘Unreal City’: Singapore in ‘The End of the Tether.’” In Conrad's Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle, edited by Gene M. Moore, pp. 85-96. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

[In the following essay, Stape identifies the unnamed city in “The End of the Tether” as Singapore and determines the influence of the city on Conrad's story.]

While unnamed in “The End of the Tether,” the Sofala's port of registry is undoubtedly late nineteenth-century Singapore, recreated with “remarkable fidelity,” as Norman Sherry rightly asserts in his study of the story's topography.1 But more than simply a feat of memory in an effort to support the realist programme of providing convincing local colour, the port city's re-creation functions structurally and thematically to generate the story's relentlessly ironic texture. John Masefield, who reviewed Youth: A...

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