A reading of a late work by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s 1916 novella The Shadow-Line is much more conventional, at least ostensibly or superficially, than some of his most celebrated earlier fiction, such as Nostromo (1904) or Under Western Eyes (1911), even though it was written later than both of those novels. In many ways it signals a return to Conrad’s earlier writing, from the 1890s, and in particular such stories as ‘Youth’ (1898). Unlike his most famous work, Heart of Darkness (1899), there is no frame-narrative device employed in The Shadow-Line; instead the narrator tells the story in the first person, direct to us, the reader (cf. Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who tells the story orally to a group of men on the boat with him in the Thames). Unlike Under Western Eyes, we are not encouraged to view the protagonist from a detached perspective, through the lens (or under the eyes) of another person; Razumov’s ‘confession’ may come to us, in his diary, mediated through the English narrator, but the narrator’s confession in The Shadow-Line (its full title is The Shadow-Line: A Confession) comes to us direct. Conrad also draws very closely on his own life experiences for the story of The Shadow-Line (he had served in the British Navy and taken command of a ship in the Gulf of Siam, like the novella’s narrator), unlike Nostromo, for which he had to rely heavily on written accounts of colonial life in South America. These features are important for any analysis of the style and structure of The Shadow-Line, in some ways an underappreciated work in Conrad’s oeuvre. Read the rest of this entry →