ABSTRACT
In "Heart of Darkness" Joseph Conrad conceives the human enterprise as a kind of cardboard reality against the background of nature. The characteristic moral somberness of Conrad stresses the triviality, meanness and inconsequence of the human adventure in the natural world. In Victory Conrad examines his principle that the beginning of an intelligible, inhabitable world is an arbitrary motive in man, expressed without support from intelligibility in nature, rather against an indifference which reads like hostility. Lord Jim is Conrad's clearest effort to relate a species of metaphysical reassurance with the achievement of moral character. When Jim jumps from the Patna he falls into a metaphysical void, a state of non-being equivalent to his loss of moral identity. As Conrad tells the story, Jim's character or his human reality is a sharp alternative to the biological response which produced his fear.
