Conrad's Theory of "Justification"
Graduation Date
Spring 1966
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
Shipley defines verisimilitude as "a degree of likeness to truth that induces the belief that the actions and characters in an imaginative work are probable or possible." Thrall and Hibbard in A Handbook to English Literature state that "the term [verisimilitude] has been used in criticism to indicate the degree to which a writer faithfully presents the semblance of truth." Modern readers accept without averting to it the idea of dramatic truth which Mortimer Adler defines when he writes: "We want a story that must be true in the sense that it could have happened in the world of characters and events which the novelist has created." Verisimilitude, then, includes anything that is credible, that "could have happened" within the framework of the fictional creation.
Joseph Conrad goes beyond Adler’s statement in his theory of "justification." He aims to present his characters so that their actions and thoughts seem inevitable within the narrative. An action is "justified” when it is the only thing that could have happened, given the fictional framework. Conrad was very particular about the inevitability of the actions of his characters within the work of art, even though he felt that, should it be necessary, his readers would allow him, as narrator, to step in and keep events, moving. He and Ford Madox-Ford used the term "justification" for the "sense of inevitability" that a story must convey. "That which happens must seem the only thing that could have happened,,, .The problem of the author is to make [the person’s] actions then, the only action that the character could have taken. It must be inevitable, because of his character, because of his ancestry, because of his past illness, or on account of the gradual coming together of the thousand small circumstances which Destiny, who is inscrutable and august will push into one certain predicament.