Unrest

Abstract

A brief look at Conrad’s state of mind soon after he started his writing career helps explain why Conrad began in his earliest stories to shift the focus from the tale to the teller. Although he has already published Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands was already completed and to be published in 1896, Conrad is plagued by anxiety and self-doubt about his new career. In an 1896 letter to Garnett he agonises: ‘Everything seems so abominably stupid. You see the belief is not in me—and without the belief—the brazen thick headed, thick skinned, immovable belief nothing good can be done…. I doubt everything. The only certitude left to me is that I cannot work for the present’ (5 Aug. 1896; Garnett, p. 65). The transition from seaman to author seems to have undermined Conrad’s belief in the coherence and stability of his personality, a belief that he gradually acquired during his career as a seaman after a tumultuous and erratic youth:

When once the truth is grasped that one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown the attainment of serenity is not very far off. Then there remains nothing but the surrender to one’s impulses, the fidelity to passing emotions which is perhaps nearer to truth than any other philosophy of life. And why not? If we are ‘ever becoming—never being’ then I would be a fool if I tried to become this thing rather than that; for I know well that I never will be anything. (23 Mar. 1896; Garnett, p. 46)