ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two examples of Joseph Conrad's shorter fiction: 'Freya of the Seven Isles: A Story of Shallow Waters' and 'The Return'. Conrad utilizes strategies of comic rhetoric and narrative: the most blatant example being the running joke of 'Nelson,' a comic device which is significantly abandoned in the final phase of the story. Freya Nelson/Nielsen is a classic comedy father, ostensibly fierce yet impotent in his struggles to protect or contain a precocious and hotly pursued daughter. Conrad creates a shocking disruption to the well-wrought comedy of the novella, and the work ultimately becomes, in Gail Fraser's words, 'a tragic story of separation and defeat'. The shifting sounds of crying and laughing are unnerving as is the face of Mrs Alvan Hervey, 'tear-stained, dolorous' yet laughing: an experience as uncomfortable as hearing the sound of laughter emerging from behind the fixed mask of tragedy.
