‘A Book, Not Bemused by the Cleverness of the Day’: Marlow as a Reader

Abstract

This chapter investigates, as a ‘transtextual biography’ the changing reading practices of Conrad’s fictional merchant seaman narrator Charles Marlow, who eventually became a land-based reader. His reading practices through time and space, from ‘Youth’, through Lord Jim and ‘Heart of Darkness’ to Chance, are located within, and against, the reading cultures of narrative time, and the extent to which this reading echoes and challenges Conrad’s own is explored. This chapter touches lightly on the concept of ‘distant reading’ to consider whether Marlow is not only an unreliable narrator but an ‘unreliable reader’. The chapter ends by considering the extent to which Conrad’s own maritime reading spaces, like those of Marlow, resonated into his shore life in his various homes.