Abstract
Was Joseph Conrad right about “The Brute” when he advised a friend to read the story in the train and then throw the magazine out of the window? This essay explores the experience of being a reader of this tale, which sometimes seems like a labyrinth offering a clutch of threads that might lead to a satisfying issue of thematic richness and coherence, only to leave the reader, all too often, at a dead end. The essay examines four images in the tale that may be either the kind of thematically significant semes which readers interpret to construct the meaning of the text, or are simply “just there,” necessary but non-meaningful infrastructure serving what Roland Barthes called “the reality effect.” On this question may depend our reaction to Conrad’s advice about what to do with “The Brute.”
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