ABSTRACT
From a certain point of view,” many of Conrad’s fictions are, like The Secret Agent, “domestic drama[s].” Thus, for example, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” recasts the quintessential domestic drama of biblical Eden. At the same time, The “Narcissus” tells a classic “sea story” in the realist tradition. Conrad’s “more than half feminine narrator,” to use Constance Garnett’s words, makes both readings available. Speaking as one of the crew, the narrator reveals the often mundane activities of “our life” at sea; but he also speaks as an omniscient observer, as one who knows that “they [the sailors] are gone now—and it does not matter…. Except, perhaps, to the few of those who believed the truth, confessed the faith—or loved the men” (18). With the benefit of hindsight, he grieves the social and economic forces—represented in Donkin—that will make the seamen and their sailing ships redundant in the coming age of steam. The voyage of the Narcissus is both routine and mythic; for the narrator, with his double vision, the end of the voyage sounds the note on the end of an era. The traces of his grief appear in his shifts from first to third person address; these shifts are the site of disruption that mark the coexistence of two texts, one of which attempts to cover with a veil of language the recognition that absolute otherness is not a fictive sexual or racial difference—represented in the West Indian James Wait—but (only) death.
