ABSTRACT
Of the writers who launched themselves about the turn of the century none is more remarkable than Joseph Conrad. A Polish orphan, he conceived a passion for the sea, was twenty years a seafarer, and became a British subject and a master-mariner. He settled down on land in 1894 and his first two novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, have a common Malayan background. Heart of Darkness, like Lord Jim, is one of the stories told by Marlow. Conrad’s ironic power is strengthened by his use of a narrator whose comments distance events and supply an additional point of judgement. The oblique method is needed to contain the intricacies of the psychological and moral investigations Conrad undertakes. Nostromo, often regarded as Conrad’s most masterly work, is a vast study of a South American country.
