Conrad’s shorter fiction: 1901–1902

Abstract

In the 1901–2 period Conrad wrote five stories, including two of his great tales, ‘Typhoon’ and ‘The End of the Tether’. While the former was published with ‘Falk: A Reminiscence’, ‘Amy Foster’, and ‘Tomorrow’ in Typhoon (1903), the latter appeared with ‘Youth’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Youth (1902). ‘Falk: A Reminiscence’ and ‘Amy Foster’ reflect Conrad’s continuing interest in the epistemological quest of a dramatised first person narrator. But the other tales are significant departures in their exploration of the possibilities of the omniscient voice. When Conrad discovered that he did not want to dramatise exclusively subjective states of mind, he turned again to the omniscient narrator. Although Conrad had used a primitive version of that voice in his first two novels and in a few of his early stories, he now learned in these stories how to control the readers’ responses by means of subtle modulations of tone, changing perspectives, deft withholding of crucial information, and manipulation of chronology. Conrad originally experimented with these techniques when writing his Marlow tales. But he still had to adopt them to the omniscient voice that he preferred when he was examining a panoramic situation or when he knew exactly what he thought about the central dramatic situation of a work. As we shall see, much of the art of the next two novels, Nostromo and The Secret Agent, depends upon the subtlety and control of the omniscient voice.