The Quest for Selfhood

Abstract

Man, says Kierkegaard in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (84), is constantly ‘in process of becoming’, a notion Conrad gives a local habitation and a name to in a remarkable number of his fictional personages. The tormented Razumov in Under Western Eyes, for example, is clearly aware of such flux: ‘“A man goes out of a room for a walk. Nothing more trivial in appearance. And yet it may be momentous. He comes back — he has seen perhaps a drunken brute, taken particular notice of the snow on the ground — and behold he is no longer the same man”’ (1:2:99). To Kierkegaard and Conrad, no man is a fixed entity with an immutable nature — as one sees not only in Razumov but also in Jim and his attempts through the torments of conscience to gain what existentialists would term authentic existence. One sees it in the inauthentic being of the major figures in Nostromo, enslaved to ‘material interests’, and of those in The Secret Agent, alienated by functionalism in an urban desert; in the self-assertion of Victory’s Heyst and Lena through their battle with external forces; and in Kurtz’s radical self-discovery that leads to his perception of his own nothingness.