Fear of the Dark: Surrealist Shadows in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

Abstract

This article argues that in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ Joseph Conrad gives narrative form to a poetics of darkness that anticipates surrealist concerns with self-dissolution, mimeticism, and loss of identity. Aligning Conrad with Roger Caillois's surrealist account of mimesis, the author argues that Conrad strives to “make [us] see” a fear of the dark that has psychological, philosophical, and narratological implications. This essay furthers a mimetic line of inquiry in modernist studies and argues that Conrad's images of darkness cast shadows that are neither realistic nor impressionistic, but surrealistic instead.

(Post)Colonial We-Narratives and the “Writing Back” Paradigm: Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat

“…An analysis of Conrad's novella through the prism of we-narration, I suggest, allows us to view Wait in terms of a conjunction, rather than an opposition, of binaries 3 and, moreover, brings to the fore the way the self, 3. Nidesh Lawtoo's (2014) analysis of the text's surrealist mode complicates these discussions. He admits that conventional readings of Wait as an embodiment of the white/dark binary andon the symbolic levellife/death, etc., may be a possible allegorical reading.…”