SOURCE: Kerr, Douglas. “Conrad and the ‘Three Ages of Man’: ‘Youth,’ The Shadow-Line, ‘The End of the Tether’.” The Conradian 23, no. 2 (autumn 1998): 27-44.

In the following essay, Kerr elucidates the themes of age and life transition in three of Conrad's stories.

The topos of the three ages of mankind provides a recurring subject in classical painting, whether the three figures are represented together in a shared allegorical landscape, as perhaps most famously by Titian in The Three Ages of Man, or more realistically, as in another Titian masterpiece, the portrait of three musicians entitled The Concert.¹ This essay will take three tales by Conrad and arrange them into an intertextual triptych so as to allow Conrad's treatment of this old theme to emerge. The tales in question are “Youth” (1898), The Shadow-Line (1917), and “The End of the Tether” (1902). Of course these are not Conrad's only studies of youth, maturity...