Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad

Four comrades gathered in a back room trying to rebuild the world and feeling themselves victims of a despicable society that crushes the poor classes, while outside, Stevie, the idiotic brother-in-law, judicious and silent, expectant at the inflammatory words, draws circles and more circles, innumerable concentric, eccentric circles. And in contrast to ideologues, wandering the streets of a London by night, a ramshackle little man with glasses carries in his coat a deadly device that can be operated by a device that he, the Professor, always carries with his hand, a walking bomb. who provides whoever asks him with the explosive material with which his dreams of desolation are founded, because he, unlike the poor anarchists who try to defeat society with the same weapons of society, thinks that death is the way out from so much shame, the massive destruction of society, of institutions. He himself is not afraid of death, always loaded with his terrible merchandise, immune to the attack of the police who know what he has hidden and who would perish with him when arrested. That angel of death feels superior to others, despite his threadbare coat and his repugnant presence, because he does not depend on life but on the disintegration of the world, without restrictions or limits. The Secret Agent is Conrad's only novel where humor appears, a bitter, sarcastic and ruthless humor. Its reading will not produce a single smile, but the way of presenting the facts penetrates the reader through a very effective resource: irony. Conrad will have no mercy on his characters, those anarchists who in his time imposed their ideas through destruction, trying to mobilize consciences through violent acts.