Amy Foster – Joseph Conrad – ‘Amy Foster’ is a short story by Joseph Conrad.
A poor emigrant from Central Europe sailing from Hamburg to America is shipwrecked off the coast of England. The residents of nearby villages, at first unaware of the sinking, and hence of the possibility of survivors, regard him as a dangerous tramp and madman. He speaks no English; his strange foreign language frightens them, and they offer him no assistance.
Eventually ‘Yanko Goorall’ (as rendered in English spelling) is given shelter and employment by an eccentric old local, Mr. Swaffer. Yanko learns a little English. He explains that his given name Yanko means ‘little John’ and that he was a mountaineer (a resident of a mountain area — a Goorall), hence his surname. The story’s narrator reveals that Yanko hailed from the Carpathian Mountains.
Yanko falls in love with Amy Foster, a servant girl who has shown him some kindness. To the community’s disapproval, they marry. The couple live in a cottage given to Yanko by Swaffer for having saved his granddaughter’s life. Yanko and Amy have a son whom Amy calls Johnny (after Little John). Amy, a simple woman, is troubled by Yanko’s behavior, particularly his trying to teach their son to pray with him in his ‘disturbing’ language.
Several months later Yanko falls severely ill and, suffering from a fever, begins raving in his native language. Amy, frightened, takes their child and flees for her life. Next morning Yanko dies of heart failure. It transpires that he had simply been asking in his native language for water.
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Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, 3 December 1857 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born novelist. Some of his works have been labelled romantic: Conrad’s supposed ‘romanticism’ is heavily imbued with irony and a fine sense of man’s capacity for self-deception. Many critics regard Conrad as an important forerunner of Modernist literature. Conrad’s narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller and Jerzy Kosinski, as well as inspiring such films as Apocalypse Now (which was drawn from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness).
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