Minding the Gap: Embodiment, Narrativity, and Identification in Under Western Eyes

Abstract

Under Western Eyes was first published in 1911, and follows Joseph Conrad’s remarkable string of work from the turn of the century, including Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and others. Its most immediate predecessor, The Secret Agent, shares with Under Western Eyes a focus upon espionage.

It may be that the problem of mind and the problem of life are in an important sense one, [entailing] how “mere matter” can acquire the intrinsic unity characteristic of both the living being and the conscious point of view…[F]or an account of consciousness to be plausible, it must be an account of consciousness as a natural phenomenon.

—Alva Noë, Action in Perception (231)