ABSTRACT
Conrad’s condition as an exile makes him particularly interested in the notion of home: in his fiction, home is frequently foregrounded as a narrative referent in a body of work featuring numerous homeward journeys and homecomings. Because return in Conrad’s fiction is attempted by creatures of alienated imagination, the place to which they return tends to reflect that alienation, and elicits, in general, an inadvertent self-consciousness that, in specific works, coheres in particular discursive modes. Conrad’s homecomings never give the reader a satisfactory closure, to say nothing of a happy ending. Indeed, one can read the homecoming in Conrad as an allegory of the human struggle, burdened by existential angst and condemned to exile as a permanent condition. In Nostromo, Martin Decoud’s return to Costaguana dramatizes Conrad’s ambivalence concerning the possibility of repatriation and his suspicion that this desire to return is fed on illusory hopes and doomed to disappointment. As Conrad depicts the end of Decoud’s exile, he simultaneously analyses the expatriate writer’s relationship with his parent culture, his love of the myth of home, and his fear of the loss of personal freedom in his reaffirmation of tradition.
