Two Prototypes of Betrayal: Almayer’s Folly

Abstract

In A Personal Record (1912), Conrad sets out to describe the beginnings of the two major phases of his life: his initiation to the sea and his initiation to the life of a writer. The narrative begins in the winter of 1893–4 with Conrad writing the tenth chapter of Almayer’s Folly, while land-locked in Rouen aboard the ‘Adowa’, which was to be his last ship. But, as Guerard has noted, between this beginning which was really an ending and the end, with his first contact with a British ship, which was really a beginning, Conrad’s memory flows freely in time and space, and the resulting commingling of the two phases suggests their essential continuity.¹ The question of continuity — in its aspects of consistency, fidelity, identity — deeply concerned Conrad, but it is through its obverse (through dislocation and betrayal) that I intend to approach his work. Conrad’s concern with betrayal is evident right from the start of his writing career, and his first two novels provide (in Nina Almayer and Willems) prototypes for two distinct, though related, forms of betrayal, to which, with their accompanying configuration of motifs, Conrad was to return again and again.