SOURCE: Kingsbury, Celia M. “‘Infinities of Absolution’: Reason, Rumor, and Duty in Joseph Conrad's ‘The Tale’.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (fall 1998): 715-29.

In the following essay, Kingsbury asserts that Conrad's story “The Tale” explores the uncertainties and moral contradictions of war.

In “Autocracy and War” Joseph Conrad writes: “It seems that in [opposing] armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery. Great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war …” (87). Of course, the war Conrad speaks of in this 1905 essay is the Russo-Japanese War, the mad soldiers, mostly Russian. And yet even a cursory examination of such works as Paul Fussell's seminal The Great War and Modern Memory reveals among soldiers of that war a debilitating “moral and physical misery,” and a highly...