Résumé
Résumé de Typhon
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love sea stories, short and intense fiction, and character studies about duty and nerve. It also rewards anyone curious about Conrad.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
Typhoon is a novella by Joseph Conrad, written around the turn of the twentieth century and published in 1902. It tells of one steamship, the Nan-Shan, and the few days when she sails straight into the worst storm of her career. Conrad was a former merchant seaman, and he knew the sea, its routines and its dangers from long years aboard ship. He wrote this story to ask what courage looks like in a man who has almost no imagination.
The man in question is Captain MacWhirr, a plain, literal and unhurried officer who has never met real trouble. Around him are a restless first mate, an engineer who writes cheerful letters home, and two hundred Chinese labourers packed below deck on the voyage back to their villages. You get a sea story with a fierce storm at its center, but also a close study of duty, stubbornness and the way ordinary people behave when everything is at stake. The story opens in calm, with a captain who cannot be hurried, so let us begin with the man himself.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A captain with no imaginationFree
- 2The Nan-Shan and her human cargo
- 3Jukes and the falling glass
- 4The storm arrives
- 5Chaos below deck
- 6What the storm is really about
Point clé 1 sur 6
A captain with no imagination
Conrad begins with a portrait. Captain MacWhirr of the steamer Nan-Shan is a man of ordinary looks and an ordinary mind. He is honest, steady and strikingly literal. He takes every remark at face value and sees no reason to dress up a plain fact with a clever word.
Conrad is gently amused by him, and so are the men who serve under him. MacWhirr has never had a shipwreck or a disaster. He has spent his career in routine, and he has come to feel that the sea is a place of routine. His mind holds the facts of the day and little else, and he has no gift for picturing dangers that have not yet arrived.
The story shows this through small scenes. MacWhirr writes to his wife at home, and the letters are dull on purpose. He talks to his officers in short, flat sentences. When others try to joke or hint, he simply fails to hear the joke. Conrad lets this go on long enough that the reader begins to wonder whether such a man can be trusted with a ship.
That question drives the whole novella. A captain who lacks imagination can be a fool, and he can also be the only calm person on board when others are afraid. Conrad keeps both readings open from the first pages, and the reader has to decide which one the storm will prove right.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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