Conrad Dismantles Providence: Deserted idylls in An Outcast of the Islands

Abstract

With the grim sequel to his present misfortunes already told in Conrad’s first novel, a half-disillusioned Almayer at the close of An Outcast of the Islands (1896) vents his disappointment by rounding on the universe,

Where’s your Providence? Where’s the good for anybody in all this? The world’s a swindle! A swindle!

The abuse he hurls at the heavens is checked at length by a stammered reply:

My dear fellow, don’t — don’t you see that the ba- bare fac- the fact of your existence is off- offensive … I- I like you — like …

(p.367)¹

The speaker is a dying naturalist specially brought in for the novel’s coda, and he punctures the ‘quarrel with Providence’ by insisting on Almayer’s part in the order he vilifies. His enigmatic words trail into silence, but the trappings of his profession combine with details of the tropical setting (insects stream into a smoking flame) to impart a strong evolutionary bias to his utterance. The decisive gloss to his remark comes in Falk (1903) when Conrad characterizes his man-eating hero, almost an emblem of the will to strive, as a creature who perpetually gives ‘cause for offence’.²