ABSTRACT
Joseph Conrad’s fiction, then, dramatizes those moments of experience which sometimes force his main characters, sometimes his narrators, and always his readers, to ask whether they can be trusted to understand what has been brought to their critical attention. Part of the difficulty of Conrad’s fiction—a difficulty which is integral to its power—stems from his relentlessly skeptical attitude toward both language and fiction. Conrad criticism characteristically probes his work for ambiguities and paradoxes and their relation to the moral implications for human action. The questions explored in Conrad’s fiction concern the nature of social and political institutions and their impact on the history of society and on the conduct of many of his protagonists. Conrad’s major fiction shows an awareness that his own conservatism can work only in historical periods when relative general prosperity predominates or conceals social and personal suffering.
