ABSTRACT
In Lord Jim, Conrad explored the self-defeating complexities inherent in romance. In particular, he began to investigate the psychological dissonance between the romantic protagonist's ideal and experience of reality. Raymond Brebach's response is typical of critical reactions to Romance that find fault with the novel's apparent unreality. In Romance, Kemp's repeated escapes, which are always at some level attempts to return home, take him further into terrain that is other than home. This pattern reaches its climax when Kemp, Seraphina and Castro are trapped in a cave in the side of a cliff, with Manuel de Populo and his men camped on the plain above them. The rhetorical force of that reintegration is driven by the need to evade the possibility of loss of self to the other. In Romance, the intertextuality between the novel and Conrad's other fiction is not aesthetically purposeful, as it is say in the Marlow or Lingard stories.
