 | Joseph Conrad - English fiction - 1921 - 594 pages
...in-^ydividuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...independent existence as against the whole scheme of tilings of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past... | |
 | American fiction - 1922 - 550 pages
...wiles of swindlers and to the pitiless enthusiasms of leaders inspired by visions of a high destiny." "In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...scheme of things of which we form a helpless part." That last sentence might have been written by Thomas Hardy. Some of Conrad's critics strangely find... | |
 | Norman Sherry - History - 1971 - 484 pages
...change and strife, and the author's own comment on the great variety of activity of the Nostromo canvas: 'In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an indedependent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part' (p.... | |
 | George Levine - Literary Criticism - 1981 - 368 pages
...water, of natural forces and forms of nature"; the narrator tells us, in true Carlylean tradition, that "in our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part" (p. 409). But the critical phrase... | |
 | Martin Price - Literary Criticism - 1983 - 400 pages
...Découd can no longer set himself against the world but is absorbed into it at the cost of his identity. "In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...scheme of things of which we form a helpless part" (III, 10) The fatalism of "form a helpless part" and the skepticism of "sustaining illusion" make one... | |
 | Susan E. Lorsch - English literature - 1983 - 190 pages
...of designification. In the scene of Decoud's suicide in Nostromo, the narrative voice asserts that "In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part."72 In his next two novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Conrad gets rid of "the whole... | |
 | George Levine - Literary Criticism - 1981 - 368 pages
...tradition, that "in our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part" (p. 409). But the critical phrase is "sustaining illusion," which places us and the narrator in an... | |
 | Ian Watt, Ian P. Watt - Literary Criticism - 1988 - 124 pages
...relatively clear- lack of sleep, little food, but above all the lack of activity; as Decoud thinks, 'in our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...scheme of things of which we form a helpless part'. Towards the evening, 'in the comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would... | |
 | Gene M. Moore - Authors, English - 1992 - 296 pages
...austere solitude that, uncomfortably for some readers, also brings him close to the Professor; for "In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion...scheme of things of which we form a helpless part" (Nostromo, 497). I shall be examining the sustaining activity of the novelist, and of the narrator... | |
 | Graham Bradshaw - Literary Criticism - 1993 - 340 pages
...through Nostromo until I found the strikingly similar passage in which Conrad writes of the need for "the sustaining illusion of an independent existence...whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part".44 This markedly Nietzschean concept of the "sustaining illusion" recurs throughout Conrad's... | |
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In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. 
