ABSTRACT
As the European literary tradition reveals, marginal, alienated, or exiled figures have always explored the colossal significance of literary options not available at home, within a stable social and literary tradition. In the course of their transition from a familiar frame of reference to a foreign, and alienating set of circumstances, expatriates and exiles develop a unique sensibility as they move freely from one culture to another. The clash of semiotic systems that produce the signs of culture and their dissemination results in the different quality of consciousness, which is best described using Bhabha’s category of cultural hybridity. This liminal condition between the cultural collectives does not represent a mechanical mixture of oppositional contents and different cultural traditions; in fact, it creates a quality of sensibility that cannot be traced back to its constituents. An expatriate writer’s trans-cultural sensibility translates into major recurrent patterns that dominate his/her fiction. They appear in different variations in all of Joseph Conrad’s major works, leaving no doubt about the connection between the author’s exilic condition and his choice of literary form and thematic patterns.
