Mapping Exile: The Route of the Judea in "Youth"

In "Youth," a picaresque chronicle about the reversals of fortune endured by the captain and crew of the barque Judea, Joseph Conrad creates an interior parallel journey for his narrator Marlow that is based on two nineteenth-century books, Burnaby's A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Strikingly different from each other, these two works suggest an alternative journey for Marlow. The fate of the Judea, its precious cargo, and its shipwrecked crew cast a dark shadow over Marlow's jaunty remembrance of his first voyage, leaving the reader with an impression of strangeness and defamiliarization that enhances and transforms the familiar sea voyage into a reflection on memory and narrative.