W H AT STRIKES the reader of Victory almost immediately is that this piece of fiction seems curiously unnovelistic: a novel, perhaps, only by hlandy definition. Closely allied to Nostromo and Under Western Eyes in theme, concerned with man's commitment to guilty action, the responsibility of the self to circumstances, the final production of Conrad's great middle period dispenses with properties of which its predecessors make extensive use. Its landscape is nearly barren of the immediate facts of social life: of manners, for example, the intimate form of social motives, and of politics, their public form. Such facts give landscape, setting, an historical or pseudo-historical position and relevance. But the scene of action in Victory is significant in the measure of its abstraction from history. It lhas only a nominal connection with the mapped and limiting world, froni which people arbitrarily arrive and to which they, like Morrison, as conveniently depart. Life in Sourabaya is confined, through sharply angled cinematic glimpses, to the recreational pastimes of gambling, persecution, conspiracy, and calumny in Schomberg's second-rate hotel for transients: if an image of society, then an image grotesquely stylized. And the island of Samburan, where the main action occurs, is located, as Lena correctly observes, virtually in empty space. Here the need to perform man's first duty to himself, his first since Adam's fall and the beginning of history, does not exist, thanks to the miraculous presence of limitless stores of food and a Chinese cook. Neither of these places has identity: the cultural identity of Hardy's Casterbridge, James's London and Paris, Joyce's Dublin; the kind which Conrad himself gives, in Nostromo, to Sulacco. Sourabaya and Samburan are merely views; they can be seen but they cannot be felt.