F ROM 1889 to 1900 Joseph Conrad produced a body of work which improved radically during the last two years of this period with the appearance of The Nigger of the Narcissus, Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim. Portions of the earlier writings are promising but Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and some of the stories read like pastiches of Flaubert or Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Although Conrad's major themes are foreshadowed in these works, he did not have the technical means to explore the question of alienation or the problem of the relation of the individual to his community with any characteristic force because he lacked a point of view adequate to his subjects and a style adequate to his temperament. In his early attempts to find his own voice Conrad responded to the literary paraphernalia of 1890s England and in varying degrees to the exoticism of Stevenson and Kipling, the Naturalism of Zola and George Moore, the aesthetic theories and stylistic devices of Maupassant and Flaubert.J My aim is to trace the route of Conrad's escape from these precursors, particularly Flaubert. This will entail a preliminary examination of Conrad's English literary environment as well as a comparison of the dissonance between his temperament and Flaubert's. I then want to suggest that the grace and power of the Marlow narratives in Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim (Chance lies beyond the temporal boundaries I have established) were made possible by the symbolic rebirth in Marlow of Conrad's primary identity as a sailor, an identity which bound work and writer together in a new imaginative context. What follows,