ABSTRACT
In Almayer’s Folly and the works that followed Joseph Conrad had already shown what were to be the characteristic directions both of his descriptive method and of his intellectual attitude towards the natural world. Conrad’s tendency to editorialise, to force the reader to accept his way of seeing things in an obtrusive and insistent way, has been widely attacked. When Conrad talks of the sea “dwarfing” or the days “racing,” however, the use of the pathetic fallacy is inconspicuous. Conrad writes: The immortal sea stretched away, immense and hazy, like the image of life, with a glittering surface and lightless depths. Conrad’s most significant visual addition is “stepped out of his lighted cabin into the darkness”. This also serves to establish the novel’s central symbolic contrast between light and darkness. In The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Conrad’s presentation of the sea, for instance, pays little attention to its varying smells, colours, or wave patterns.
