ABSTRACT
Throughout Conrad’s major fiction the problematical relation between action and intention, language and experience, threatens the supposed coherence of a character’s or a narrator’s action or understanding, and opens the complex play of antithetical meanings. From Heart of Darkness through Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, to Victory, Conrad’s narratives dramatize the enigmas which represent, for him, the deepest questions of existence. Conrad’s major fiction, then, becomes far more compelling when one begins to ponder the important and difficult questions that it articulates and dramatizes. The irony of Conrad’s political novels is not the nihilistic irony which is indifferent to all forms of suffering, exploitation, and wrongdoing. Conrad’s fiction is, in a radical sense, antitheoretical. Its devastating critique of anarchism, for instance, underpins a liberal democratic faith in individualism, but this faith is always counterbalanced by a relentless scrutiny of individualism as it manifests itself in various forms of egotistical projects.
