ABSTRACT
Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the author’s tribute to his fellow seamen, remains one of the most impressive portraits of proletarian lives in a period in which workmen, if they appeared at all, were usually presented in the most stereotypical and demeaning postures. It also creates an original-in fact, virtually unprecedented-narrative form for representing a collective consciousness. Partly because of its radical departure from conventional representational practice, this form still remains imperfectly understood, and its impressive lineage has gone largely unrecognized. The text is further haunted by a specter-the specter of socialism and other radical social movements that purported to represent (in both senses of the term) working-class consciousness unconfined by national boundaries. It is Conrad’s complex negotiation of these three components that I explore in what follows.
