The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’

Abstract

With The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ we come to Conard’s first mature piece of work. Almayer’s Folly, on which he spent at least four and a half years, is a highly finished novel, but remains none the less, relative to the rest of the Conrad canon, very much an introductory, experimental production. An Outcast of the Islands, although somewhat longer, was scarcely more than one year in the writing and bears the marks, in its structural anomalies, of being a less certain, more tentative piece. In these two novels, and in An Outpost of Progress, Conrad experimented with the fictional structures and concepts which, with some radical changes of style and technique, were to form the basis for the great works of his early period — The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim.