ABSTRACT
Any connection between Wittgenstein and Conrad may at first seem suspect. Wittgenstein was an infant when Conrad was achieving what his narrator Marlow calls “my farthest point of navigation”1 in the Congo, and he was still a child when Heart of Darkness was published. So far as I have been able to determine, Wittgenstein never read Conrad. And the only work of Wittgenstein’s to which Conrad before he died could have had access, the Tractatus, would scarcely have interested him. But these and other particular separations might amount to unnecessary evidence for what might seem obvious to any reader of both of these writers: the novelist and the philosopher were worlds apart.2
