ABSTRACT
'The Cast-Away' is, as Vincent Newey has written, 'an anti-hymn, an inversion of the narrative of saving or redemptive intervention', in which W. Cowper, 'existentialist hero', 'authors' a centred self 'which can be held even as frameworks of faith disintegrate'. J. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work concerned with the disintegration of various kinds of faith and the concomitant 'gulphs', may well owe something to Cowper's haunting seafaring tale, but our hold on it is tentative, in part because of Marlow, the framed narrative's second narrator. The blush is a slip rooted in the modern conception of the self: 'The modern outlook brings to realization a split between the Real Me and the persona that one puts on for the external world.' At the end of the eighteenth century, Cowper, in 'The Cast-Away', authored a centred self 'which can be held even as frameworks of faith disintegrate'.
