SOURCE: Stape, J. H. “Conrad's ‘Unreal City’: Singapore in ‘The End of the Tether.’” In Conrad's Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle, edited by Gene M. Moore, pp. 85-96. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.

In the following essay, Stape identifies the unnamed city in “The End of the Tether” as Singapore and determines the influence of the city on Conrad's story.

While unnamed in “The End of the Tether,” the Sofala's port of registry is undoubtedly late nineteenth-century Singapore, recreated with “remarkable fidelity,” as Norman Sherry rightly asserts in his study of the story's topography.¹ But more than simply a feat of memory in an effort to support the realist programme of providing convincing local colour, the port city's re-creation functions structurally and thematically to generate the story's relentlessly ironic texture. John Masefield, who reviewed Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, has not been alone in misconstruing the tale's...