Narrative Form in Conrad and Lowry

Abstract

The Man and the Myth have become part of the novels of both Conrad and Lowry — seamen, exiles, and perhaps the two most personal of English novelists. Both worked and reworked their own past, and in each case the transformation had become a matter of personal integrity, of integration, so that the novels and stories, whilst rooted in history, would ‘transform it from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience’, as Conrad observed, whilst ‘Public mind fastens on externals, on mere facts, such for instance as ships and voyages, without paying attention to any deeper significance they may have.’ (Life and Letters, II, 321,320).