The Nigger of the Narcissus (original) (raw)
1,689 reviews8,870 followers
"The were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Their successors are the grown-up children of a discontented earth. They are less naughty, but less innocent; less profane, but perhaps also less believing; and if they had learned how to speak they have also learned how to whine."
- Joseph Conrad, The Children of the Sea
"All work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line."
- Joseph Conrad, Introduction to The Children of the Sea
IN a book whose very title suggests it is rigged with the weight of race and racism, bigotry and brutality, it is strange to discover the book is really not especially about race. While the main character in The N____ of Narcissus IS black, the book's narrative (after the beginning) doesn't hardly deal with that. Race is practically the least interesting, least compelling THING about James Wait. It is hard to figure out how to talk about the book. I have no card. Nobody who isn't black has a card, so do I avoid the title. Use the alternate title (The Children of the Sea)? Do I only use N______? Do I bow to Kanye and use broke broke?
The disastrously named book is, however, fundamentally about humanity. Like most of Conrad's books, the sea provides a rhythm and a boat provides the setting for exploring the way men interact. Looking at the way men deal with life and death and the contradictions we feel towards those we love and those we hate is a taut canvas for Conrad to sew what was probably the beginning of his best period of writing. This novella was followed immediately by such masterpieces as: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, etc.
The other gem from this book is Conrad's bold introduction, which is considered one of the best "manifestos of literary impressionism". If you don't like fiction, the short introduction, all by itself, is almost worth the price of admission.
496 reviews
First, let's get the book 'title issue' out of the way. Don't come to me with your cowardly, censuring, squeamishness. If you can't handle classic novels as their authors originally wrote them, then go get yourself a job in a government ministry in a totalitarian state somewhere, get yourself a job in a small-town library where you can have Czarist powers, go get yourself a little rubber stamp and a little pot of whitewash and maybe an armband. I am reviewing this book under its original title-- and there's nothing you can do about it.
Now then. What do I think of the quality of the writing found in this Joe Conrad book? What do I think of the theme, characters, setting, structure?
Well, I think pretty highly of all of it. The book as a whole receives only 3/5 stars from me but this is simply due to the overall impression the work left me with; not because I can cite a great many things wrong with it. There aren't a great many things wrong with it. While 'Narcissus' is not among my very favorite Joe novels, it lies somewhere in the upper-middle-range of my tastes. Nevertheless, I can recommend plenty that lies between its covers.
Basically, this is a manly novel, full of manly men, and manly drama. The book has little to do with today's world. The ship in the story is a sailing vessel, and I mean a very old-timey sailing vessel which only has sailors on it. No women in the entire yarn, as I recall. [Great! One less thing for readers to complain about!]
As a sea tale--all the usual sea-tale-'tropes' which one expects to see are present and they are all handled very well by Uncle Joe. He could hardly fail in this, considering his adventurous early life spent at sea, himself. He paid his dues.
The characters aboard the ship --and the odd predicament they find themselves in--are handled just fine. Conrad follows them about their routines and tasks with keen eye for detail; which he delivers up with the necessary 'grit' and sweat and grime and cursing, to make you feel immersed in the world of the ship. It's capably done; (although many other authors can probably do it just as well).
The negro character at the center of the story, is vivid for his bombast and his colorful flair in everything he says or does; but it's all quite exaggerated and theatrical. I would not affirm that this figure is one of Conrad's best creations; nor would I agree that its a very fulfilling psychological portrait. The man is a 'plot device' only; and written with remoteness; at third-hand.
Although I love Conrad, I don't give a 'free pass' to everything he attempted in his career. In this case, it's just not a very rewarding character. The 'outsider' doesn't evoke sympathy; in fact, he is rather a pain-in-the-ass to read about. An annoying and abrasive figure, to say the least. Is this a good idea to base a novella on? Maybe not.
He is at the center of the story though, because what Conrad really wants to write about in this tale is the attitudes and feelings of a group of blue-collar sea-dogs. That is to say: all of the other sailors aboard the Narcissus. They're a motif here for 'everyman' --regular guys throughout the whole of the working world, the white man's world, the western world. That's what Conrad knew intimately, after all--so why not write about it? He's writing what he knows.
And Conrad does a helluva good job in this department; the psychological side of things; the psychology of men like himself; this is something he knows very well and knows very well how to describe.
This is the meat of the story: how these men's attitudes transform from one side of the compass (utter scorn & hatred towards the unappealing black man in their midst) and then how their mood swings all the way over to the other side of the dial (to love, friendship, loyalty, compassion, and identification towards him).
This is NOT something 'just any writer' can do. And it more than justifies itself and justifies the title of the book.
There's something else to talk about. I've told you above how this is a novel of men; but it's also a novel of the sea-- and a fabulous one. A milestone, really. In Conrad's oeuvre--just this, and one other book ('Typhoon') contain his very best 'sea' writing.
And this makes it some of the best 'sea-writing' in the English language. It is the backdrop to the tale but it is stupendous. If nothing else, you read 'Narcissus' for these eye-popping stormy passages and you're grateful. Because almost no one else has ever done descriptions of wind and waves; better than this one guy. Joseph Conrad. He soars in this skill-area. I know only two authors (same timeperiod) who compare: Tomlinson, and Traven. These men are the Melvilles and Vernes of the 20th century.
Where does the book go wrong, if anywhere? I won't gloss over it. Where it falters and becomes awkward (and even tedious!) is when Conrad goes spiraling off into lengthy, painful, poetic musings about the idyllic nature of man. There is utterly ponderous and sententious rhapsodizing about the twin poles (sublime and monstrous) of good and evil in men's natures...the same sort of thing you encounter in 'Heart of Darkness'. Come on, Joe Man. Enough.
It is these and only these passages which make the book 'higher literature' (high-minded anyway) but to me, it only suggests that a more aggressive editor was needed. Uncle Joe goes on for pages at a time with these cerebral musings and it is all very wince-worthy. It's the only obstacle one ever stumbles over in the writing of this great author. Too preachy. Too many monologues. [No, don't hand me any BS about his 'racism'. He's not a racist, you're a neophyte.]
Anyway. When held in check, his philosophizing makes some superb novels: 'Lord Jim' for instance; 'Nostromo'...in 'Secret Sharer' it excels; but it almost ruins 'Heart of Darkness' and definitely does ruin 'Almayer's Folly' and other tripe like 'The Arrow of Gold'.
So what's the final tally here? The book has 5-or-so strengths. 3/5 of these aspects are great while 2/5; not-so-great. Hence my 3/5 book rating and my overall lukewarm-ish feeling towards the experience. It was indeed a wonderful read while it lasted; but I've never sought it out for a re-read; however it does make me search for other works of the same ilk. What more can one ask, really? Enjoyed it, benefited from it, and want more. Nuf said.
854 reviews73 followers
Obviously the title alone puts it somewhat beyond the pale for a high school curriculum - even the reader with a broader experience of the evolution of racial attitudes is going to approach in hopes of a more progressive stance than s/he's likely to get.
The title character is a West Indian (St. Kitts, I think) with an aristocratic demeanor and a resonant voice (one can imagine James Earl Jones in the part) who can mete out twice the disdain he receives, a sailor hired on in India for a trip back to England who immediately declares himself too ill to work. Although suggestions that he's malingering arise and at one point he sneers that he is in fact defrauding the chiefs, it turns out he is actually dying and ultimately deluding himself. All the other hands revolve around him as a sort of all-purpose "other"; the most iconic characters are the captain who embodies noblesse oblige, a Cockney left-wing agitator who we are persuaded to disdain, even though he gives voice to the reform movement of the latter 19th c. against the dreadful treatment of the merchant marine (that Conrad himself belatedly came around to, outgrowing the more "macho" libertarian attitude to seagoing culture of his earlier days) and the old salt, the 60-ish lifetime sailor who is as unquestioning of the class hierarchy of the ship as the captain.
The complex racial, social and political questions that Conrad raises despite the neutral authorial stance, the trope of the ship as a microcosm of society with a purity of purpose that is contrasted to the unexamined lives on the shore, and the sometimes breathtaking prose are all worth the work of reading it.
The other accomplishment of the book is what we would now call the "cinematic" descriptions of storms at sea - I found them dizzying and at times preferable to skim. Conrad was apparently influenced by the battle scenes in The Red Badge of Courage which I immediately picked up for comparison.
Author 6 books229 followers
"He was at all extremity."
Forget the title for a minute, though I'll say something about that shortly.
This is one of Conrad's finest works, and its tight, succinct, and scathing effectiveness as a morality tale might even set it higher than "Heart of Darkness".
The plot is simple: a black English sailor is dying aboard the Narcissus during its journey home. Initially, he is seen as a shirker, but as it becomes apparent that he actually is dying, the swarm of roiling humanity among the morally uncouth crew asserts itself and they become his champion, even threatening mutiny against the captain.
For such a brief novel, there are a lot of layers at work here. One is the idea of a utopia (the ship) disturbed by the brute incursion of reality (death). The first third of the book, during which the n-word is peppered, focuses on the sailors' horror at the specter of death among them. "He became the tormentor of our moments." "Invulnerable in his promise of speedy corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage."
The dying sailor reminds them of their own mortality. His "companion", death, strikes fear into the hearts of the sailors at first. Then, curiously, the tone shifts, and the crew, reminded constantly that no matter what they do, they are doomed, and that the dying sailor is nothing more than a reminder of their own futility, begin to care for him, go out of their way to protect him, even risking their own lives to do so.
This is a very strange book, with so stark a bifurcation in its approach to the subject of death. At first, the sailor is referred to disparagingly, using the titular slur. But once the sailors rally to him, compassionately surrounding him in his dying days, the word vanishes. I'm not sure if Conrad intended that, but the effect is very dramatic. What is at first the usual disparaging prejudice soon becomes a battle against death in the name of the dying sailor.
523 reviews259 followers
I did like this novella, but in comparison to his other works, I must admit that I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one and I don't mean just the unfortunate title. In many ways it is similar to other mariner stories of his that I have read, (for example The Typhoon) and yet there is something different about it. The writing is brilliant as always, Conrad creates an interesting cast of characters, the narrative kept my interest, but for some reason my heart wasn't completely in it. I felt like there was something I was missing. Maybe I was just tired, I went to sleep late, and woke up at quarter to seven this morning, figured I might as well finish this book and read it in one sitting. I felt immersed in the story the whole time. Still, it seems to me that it is not one of Conrad's bests.
I can see why this novella, for many, marks the beginning of Conrad's 'quality writing'. This novella is not without its literary qualities. It is easy to see its appeal, as it keeps the readers attention in many ways. For one, it's adventurous and keeps up the suspense by more than just serious of events. Secondly, the cast of characters is quite impressive. Conrad is always a master when it comes to psychological characterization of his characters. Moreover, the theme of isolation and the constant feeling of uncertainly is brilliantly handled. The story of a black man suffering from an incurable illness (tuberculosis I think?) is interconnected with the stories of all other man on board. In a way, we are all isolated within our skins.
The first couple of times I started this novel, I got lost in the author's Preface, which is a brilliant essay on nature of art and writing. The only Preface I enjoyed as much is Oscar Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. One can't simply pick a passage from it, because it feels it would be a crime to cut into such a beautiful text. I'm tempted to copy the entire text here, as I find it hard to selected just one passage for it. In comparison with the above mentioned Preface, the book itself initially seemed a bit bleak.
The opening felt a bit cold. However, once I really got into this novella (this morning that is) I had no problem finishing it. I did enjoy this novella, but perhaps not as much as other Conrad's stories. There was something uneasy about this, a bit too much uncertainty. To a modern reader, some parts of it might seem racist, although I don't think that was Conrad's intention at all, it still might make it a bit harder to read to some. I don't think it is fair to drag things out of the context, the principal character is portrayed no less as a human being than any other character. I can understand why some might be put off by the title as well. Paradoxically, this novella was first published under the title Children of Sea in USA, not because they deemed the word offensive, but because the publishers believed that nobody would read a book about a black man. That's even more sad, the reason for the change.
In reality, Jimmy is not isolated because of his race, or because of his illness but because he is human and all humans are born and die alone. The racial difference perhaps just highlights the human isolation. It is a bit of a depressive story in the sense that one gets the feeling that human altruism is essentially self-suffocating, that we only tend to help others when there is something in it for us. At the same, it shows that a group of people, in this case a crew of a ship (perhaps a metaphor for human society), are interconnected in more ways than we would have guessed. It is a sad paradox of the human condition, isn't it? We are interconnected but at the same time we are also desperately alone. If this novella is truly (as some say) a metaphor for human isolation, then it is a very fitting and well written metaphor. A brilliantly written novella, but compared with some of Conrad's mature works, I felt like it lacks a bit of finesse. I can definitely recommend it to fans of Conrad, but for those wanting to read him for the first time, maybe it is not the best book to start with.
506 reviews152 followers
Un viaggio per nave da Bombay a Londra diventa per Conrad il mezzo per raccontare le dinamiche di una comunità, quella della ciurma e del suo capitano, perfettamente sovrapponibili a quelle della società in generale. Solidarietà, senso di appartenenza, diversità, indifferenza, violenza, desiderio di vendetta si alternano e si fondono dando ritmo e intensità al racconto. C’è il disprezzo per chi non rispetta le regole, ma si avverte anche una sottile critica verso chi si mostra eccessivamente sensibile in momenti di pericolo, come nel caso della terribile splendida tempesta che si abbatte sulla nave, mettendo a rischio l’ordine sociale.
brb3 brb3-2 letteratura-inglese
1,440 reviews4,495 followers
Wow, i really struggled with this. I found it really challenging to read, with its oppressive format. For me it is pain to endure a book with paragraphs over a page long. The last time I tried it was that awful book The Flanders Road which was absolutely unreadable.
This book was a little better, but not enough for me to read it fully. I don't mind admitting that I had already given up by the midpoint, and I skimmed after that.
I didn't enjoy it enough to persist. Strange, as I enjoyed most of the other Conrad that I have read, just not for me at this time I guess.
2 stars.
fiction historical-fiction nautical
86 reviews3 followers
I confess that I read this as part of a "Typhoon and other Tales", but is was so awesome that I felt it deserved a rating all of it's own. It was so twisted and true how Conrad played out and expressed the actions, self interests, unspoken trusts, mistrusts, deceptions, and weaknesses of this crew of a sailing ship. Granted I wasn't initially interested in all the British Sailor talk and trying to figure out what they were saying with their thick accents and sea faring lingo, but ultimately that only added to the intensity of the misunderstandings, inflated egos, and confusion aboard the ship.
Yet another of Conrad's amazing dissections of the the beauty and blackness of our fallen hearts.
513 reviews87 followers
[Jan, 2017]
Children of the Sea
Bombay, un imprecisato anno del 1800. Sono già calate le prime ombre della sera quando James Wait, imponente negro delle Indie Occidentali, si imbarca sul Narcissus, che farà rotta per l’Inghilterra. «Udirono la sua voce risonante nell’ampio petto come se le parole rotolassero verso di loro dalla profondità di un aspro passato.».
I marinai e gli ufficiali sono ormai tutti a bordo, l’appello si è concluso.
«Lasciato il caldo bagliore del castello di prua, i marinai furono avvolti dalla serena luminosità della notte, il cui tiepido alito si effondeva sotto le stelle che innumerevoli costellavano lo spazio avvolgendo gli alberi di un pulviscolo luminoso. Verso la città l’oscurità dell’acqua era solcata da strisce di luce che ondeggiavano dolcemente sull’increspatura del mare, come dei filamenti che si prolungassero radicati verso la riva.».
Il vecchio Singleton, marinaio anziano ed esperto, sta seduto in disparte sul ponte, proprio sotto le lanterne, nudo fino alla cintola, tatuato come un capo tribù cannibale su tutto il torace possente e sui bicipiti enormi. Con gli occhiali e una venerabile barba bianca somiglia a un patriarca colto e selvaggio, legge Pelham di Bulwer-Lytton … (sì, Bulwer-Lytton, proprio lui; quello di … ‘era una notte buia e tempestosa’ di Snoopy. Vedere alla voce … Eco …).
Al mattino dopo il Narcissus salperà alla volta della madrepatria. Il coraggio, la coesione dell’equipaggio e la solidità della nave saranno messi a dura prova da una eccezionale tempesta. «Avevano troppo freddo per essere curiosi e per nutrire qualche speranza. Non potevano distrarre un momento o un pensiero dalla grande preoccupazione della sopravvivenza. Il desiderio di sopravvivere li teneva vivi, apatici e tolleranti sotto la crudele sferza del vento e del freddo; mentre la volta celeste, cupa e stellata, si muoveva lentamente sopra la nave alla deriva, carica della loro pazienza e della loro sofferenza, nella tempestosa solitudine del mare.».
Sarà che amo il mare, sarà che mi perdo nei racconti di mare – da L’isola del tesoro a Master & Commander – ma questo racconto di … Józef Teodor Korzeniowski, già ufficiale della Marina di Sua Maestà Britannica, ti rapisce e ti ammalia. Credo che, tra i tanti, O’Brian e Forester debbano molto a questo scrittore polacco, grande esperto di mare e di vela, ma anche grande ‘esploratore degli abissi della mente umana’.
«”Barra al vento” Gridò secco il Capitano. “Correte a poppa, signor Creighton, andate a vedere che sta facendo quell’imbecille del timoniere”. “Bordate piatti i fiocchi. Pronti a virare i bracci di prua al vento,” grugnì il signor Baker. “Si va, signore!”. “Portate piano”. “Va bene.”. “Allentate piano le scotte. Dugliate le manovre,” grugnì indaffarato il signor Baker.» … Muchisimas gracias lindisima amapola.
2,424 reviews132 followers
Although Conrad is famous for his seafaring tales, I have generally preferred his books that are set mostly or wholly on land. This is my favorite of all of his seafaring tales that I have read so far; it is better for example in my opinion than Typhoon or The Shadow Line, which are both good stories, but not up to Conrad's best.
This is one of the best stories told from the perspective of the crew of a sailing ship that I have ever read by any author. The only one I can think of that I enjoyed as much is Two Years Before The Mast.
All of the characters in this story are distinctive and interesting. Their interactions with each other and with their ship, their officers and the sea all ring true. They are clearly rough men hardened by years in a rough profession, but the sickness of the title character brings out an unexpected tenderness and solicitude in them, even though he is black man in an era when prejudice was far worse than it is today, even though they suspect him of being a malingerer and despite his apparent lack of appreciation for their ministrations. They hate him for all of these reasons and yet they still care for him.
The narration is first person, but we know almost nothing about the narrator, so that it almost becomes third person. It is an interesting technique that Conrad would later perfect with Marlowe in Heart of Darkness.
789 reviews239 followers
“The Story by Which, as a Creative Artist, I Shall Stand or Fall“, or: Preferring Not to, Part II
Writing a review on a novel by Joseph Conrad is always very hard for me because I have the feeling that whatever approach I choose, I could have chosen an even better one, his texts being so multi-layered and full of whisperings ambiguous, mysterious and manifold. Okay, before I start dabbling in Conradese myself – something I’d undoubtedly fail in – I had better get my tuppence ready with regard to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, which many critics consider to be Conrad’s first great achievement as a novelist and which the writer himself meant to be his litmus test as a creative artist.
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ was written in 1896 and is loosely based on Conrad’s own experiences as a sailor; in 1884, Conrad made a voyage on the real Narcissus from Bombay to Dunkirk as a Second Mate, and some of the events described in his novella may be based on adversities Conrad and his fellow-sailers had to contend with. And yet, Conrad’s third novel is much more than “just” an accout of adventures at sea partly based on fact and experience. In The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad powerfully expresses his emotional leanings towards a seafaring life but he also unfolds a rather pessimistic worldview, maybe an even more pessimistic one than in many of his later works. Just take this passage:
”Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man’s passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone—those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and, indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Their successors are the grown-up children of a discontented earth. They are less naughty, but less innocent; less profane, but perhaps also less believing; and if they have learned how to speak they have also learned how to whine. But the others were strong and mute; they were effaced, bowed and enduring, like stone caryatides that hold up in the night the lighted halls of a resplendent and glorious edifice. They are gone now—and it does not matter. The sea and the earth are unfaithful to their children: a truth, a faith, a generation of men goes—and is forgotten, and it does not matter! Except, perhaps, to the few of those who believed the truth, confessed the faith—or loved the men.”
Here we see Singleton as a kind of Nietzschean archetype, larger-than-life and aus der Zeit gefallen, i.e. indifferently anachronistic. The narrator is clearly partial to Singleton and his almost super-human stoicism but he also knows that the days of men like Singleton are numbered, which is not only expressed through his name but also through the description of the man we get from the perspective of one of the pathetic, bird-like landlubbers at the end of the book:
”Singleton came up, venerable—and uncertain as to daylight; brown drops of tobacco juice hung in his white beard; his hands, that never hesitated in the great light of the open sea, could hardly find the small pile of gold in the profound darkness of the shore. ‘Can’t write?’ said the clerk, shocked. ‘Make a mark, then.’ Singleton painfully sketched in a heavy cross, blotted the page. ‘What a disgusting old brute,’ muttered the clerk.
Like those “everlasting children of the mysterious sea”, once ashore, Singleton is probably out of his element, and like him, the Narcissus, the moment she has reached the London docks, “had ceased to live”. Conrad’s inner connection with the men and the kind of life he describes is also mirrored in the seemingly inconsistent narrative perspective in that not only does he use the first person singular pronoun – interestingly, this hardly happens before his narrator is treading London ground, where all the men quickly disperse never to reunite again after pay-off – and the plural pronoun “we”, which gives the impression of the hands on board acting as one seasoned team, but he also makes use of a more distanced, omniscient narrator, which allows him to enter the mind of and give information on various characters such as the grim captain, Allistoun, the evangelizing cook or the ambiguous West Indian James Wait. Some have found fault with this seemingly incoherent point of view, but one may assume that Conrad, like Melville when writing his masterpiece Moby-Dick, knew well what he was doing. In fact, the breach of perspective adds narrative dimension to the text.
Conrad’s partiality to the rough and ready Singleton seems to advocate a kind of pessimistic primitivism that is not so easily traceable in his later works and that may alienate modern readers. The focus of the novella lies on James Wait, whose name is a play on the words “wait” and “weight”, a black sailor who is infected with tuberculosis and who at first exaggerates his health problems in order to win himself an easy voyage, shunning work and petulantly exploiting his fellow-sailors’ sympathy or bad conscience. Wait will also become the involuntary cause of a potential mutiny when the captain, who has not the heart to confront Wait with the fact of the inevitability of his impending death, denies him the right to join the other men in their work on the grounds that he has been malingering and will accordingly not receive any pay. Ironically, as the text makes clear, the captain’s act was prompted by a desire to be kind and to spare Wait a grim truth as long as possible. Similarly, the crew of the Narcissus, as far as they feel pity for Wait seem to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” in that they are no longer able and willing to do their duty and brave it out against the forces of nature that rage around them. Especially one of the sailors, Belfast, is becoming more and more of a whining wimp, and it can be said that Wait is actually like a weight that pulls the men’s spirits down. When they are risking their lives to save Wait during a murderous gale, they appear not so much actuated by compassion but rather by stubbornness, as the following passage implies:
”We had so far saved him; and it had become a personal matter between us and the sea. We meant to stick to him. Had we (by an incredible hypothesis) undergone similar toil and trouble for an empty cask, that cask would have become as precious to us as Jimmy was. More precious, in fact, because we would have had no reason to hate the cask. And we hated James Wait. We could not get rid of the monstrous suspicion that this astounding black-man was shamming sick, had been malingering heartlessly in the face of our toil, of our scorn, of our patience—and now was malingering in the face of our devotion—in the face of death. Our vague and imperfect morality rose with disgust at his unmanly lie. […] And we hated him because of the suspicion; we detested him because of the doubt. We could not scorn him safely—neither could we pity him without risk to our dignity. So we hated him and passed him carefully from hand to hand.”
Here, too, Singleton is one of the few men who are not taken in by Wait’s lamentations but who simply tells him that if he were to die he should go about it without any fuss. The text even goes further in its denunciation of pity in that it implies that compassion often grows out of a feeling of expectation that other people would feel the same way for us if ever we found ourselves in a lamentable situation. This idea, which again makes one think of Nietzsche, is most clearly expressed when the narrator gives us insight into Donkin’s mind – he is the actual villain of the story – when faced with the dying Wait:
”And Donkin, watching the end of that hateful nigger, felt the anguishing grasp of a great sorrow on his heart at the thought that he himself, some day, would have to go through it all—just like this—perhaps! His eyes became moist. ‘Poor beggar,’ he murmured.”
Thus, the impulse of pity is fully discredited in the narration, since Donkin stands for everything that is most despicable and mean in human nature. Conrad also uses this character, who will actually stoop to robbing a dead man, in order to voice his criticism of socialism as a doctrine that breeds social disorder and appeals to man’s lowest impulses by pretending to lead the way towards an earthly paradise. Donkin fails to win the respect and friendship of the crew-members, although he may temporarily lead their minds astray by inducing them into “preferring not to” face the necessities of daily life with dignity, but, characteristically, when he walks about in dapper clothes bought with the money he stole, the landlubbers are taken in by appearances.
Apart from the philosophical and political subtext concerning pity, primitivism and socialism, the text also offers a variety of other subjects, e.g. the question whether the Narcissus is meant to represent a microcosm of human society, as is often implied in the text, or whether it might not even be the smaller microcosm of man’s nature as such. Reading it this way, we might conceive of James Wait as our impulse to sloth and taking the easiest way out of the challenges imposed on us by life, whereas the captain stands for the will to stick to what we regard as right and worth living for. It is probably no accident that The Nigger of the Narcissus was first published in the prestigious New Review, which was edited by the poet William Ernest Henley, who is renowned for the poem “Invictus”, which ends with these well-known lines:
”It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”
Even though the question of souls is treated rather lightly in Conrad’s novel, the idea that man ought to go on steering his vessel through life’s gales and deep waters, like Singleton at the helm, shines through nearly every page of the story. We may not share all of Conrad’s ideas here but I think we can hardly deny him the credit of having written an outstanding novel.
Part I of "Preferring Not to" can be found here
188 reviews50 followers
"She was born in the thunderous peal of hammers beating upon iron, in black eddies of smoke, under a grey sky, on the banks of the Clyde. The clamorous and sombre steam gives birth to things of beauty that float away into the sunshine of the world to be loved by men."
'The Nigger Of The Narcissus' is considered as one of the early definitive works in the oeuvre of Joseph Conrad and with good reason. It seems, in many places, very much the sophomoric work of a brilliant writer blessed with a natural gift for language and characterisation. There is not much of a compelling narrative to be discerned or found out from the middling bones of the plot of a ship bound home from Bombay to London and about Jim Waits, its only African-English seaman, the titular 'nigger' of the story, who is suffering from tuberculosis and is near death. And there is preciously little that Conrad does to flesh out those bare bones; for a reader looking for an eventful and romantically charming adventure across seas and lands, there is little romanticism or adventure to be found in between the covers; a lot does happen, indeed, from storm at sea to the stirrings of open mutiny but not much of it has any bearing on the denouement or even at what Conrad is aiming at throughout the novel.
But, but...that language. That gift of prose and characterisation. Those words, those rolling, majestic sentences, those helpless, desperate, believable and thoughtful souls that populate the vivid, incredible yet all too real world that Conrad crafts and conjures up so beautifully, with such heartfelt passion. If for nothing else, one could read the whole of 'The Nigger Of Narcissus' in a single, relentless session of a few hours into a sleepless night, just for the sheer, breathtaking beauty with which he portrayed the rather mundane and unspectacular odyssey at the crux of it all. But the words, the turns of phrase, the bejewelled metaphors and the aching, utterly poignant honesty and despair of the unforgettable characters, they will make you pause, reflect, brood, bask in the glow of their transcendence.
That also explains why I took my time over this book, as I nearly did with 'Heart Of Darkness' too. Of course, the former has hardly any of the latter's groundbreaking, nightmarishly prescient vision but it does share a hypnotic intensity, a compulsive readability and a poetic weight that is to be found in almost all the writer's great works. Conrad clearly belonged to the league of greats because like others, he could tug us in, by the hand, into a time and a place that might be the past or pure fantasy dreamed up by a storyteller but portrayed, in an epic scale and with such tender intimacy, that we frequently sigh in wonder as we marvel at it.
Just as the gritty, grimy, disgruntled, desperate, garrulous and even distinguished souls aboard 'The Narcissus' sigh with romantic fascination at how their ship, their beautiful, brave, noble ship and abode holds her own against the fury of Mother Nature. And these men are also bound together in an unlikely and unexpectedly altruistic mission, to help poor Jim Waits, already on the throes of impending death, through all his tantrums, whims and fancies. All that talk about Conrad harbouring racist or homophobic tendencies can be deemed as gobbledygook: the truth is that like Dickens' empathy (and not merely pity or compensatory sympathy) for Fagin, Conrad's voice for Jim Waits is real, unadorned and honest in its bipolar expression of pretended strength and devastating fear, of cocksure, smug confidence and utterly heartbreaking vulnerability. Let the hard-nosed critics make what they can out of this.
Equally unforgettable are the other characters in the fray - the impassioned and flustered Belfast, who takes upon himself the noble but earnest duty of attending to Jim; Donkin, the good-for-nothing stowaway who is full of unreasoning grievance; Singleton, the quiet, laconic elderly seaman who also serves as the ship's de facto philosopher and also one of the sturdiest and most strong-willed hands. The beautifully calculated and believably organic grace in which Conrad lets these characters interplay with each other and Jim itself makes for a stirring human drama unfolding in the narrative, so much that we forget our expectations of romance, entertainment and high drama in the seas.
And then, there is the ship itself. 'The Narcissus' is as much a beautifully, elaborately sculpted character as much as these creations of flesh and blood and witnessing her in all her glory, gallantry and mesmeric movement is a literary experience that needs to be savoured on its own to be believed. An unforgettable, utterly beautiful read that can transport you in an odyssey to a whole new world.
Author 19 books284 followers
January 25, 2020
La vita del marinaio in tutte le sue sfaccettature. Nel bene o nel male. Amicizia, invidia, scontri, legami, mondi che si scontrano e che cercano un punto d'incontro nell'affrontar le avversità del mare. Poeticissima l'ultima parte. Forse se Conrad avesse esteso stile e temi di queste ultime righe a tutto il romanzo avrebbe creato un capolavoro immortale.
239 reviews752 followers
Want to read
This edition of Nigger Of The Nostromo offers an alternate, more PC title to that of the original, which makes sense to me, since the N-word in the other title actually only became the nasty word it is today, in the interim since Conrad had published this.
I'd never read this before, I suspect partly because of it's offensive original title. I'm curious about it though, since I've heard that Conrad did not wrote it as a racist work. Of course, I personally don't think he meant to write Heart of Darkness as a racist work either, though there are those who differ about that.
I'd like to throw out big question marks as to why on earth the N-word has not been censored out of the original title. Having a word in the text of a book, is not quite the same as having it in the title. Perhaps simply because it is part of the oeuvre of a great writer, and thus has become too well known by it's original title, and has become a part of the Western canon known by that title?
Author 10 books68 followers
Joseph Conrad is one of those extraordinary, singular anomalies in the annals of literature. Born into Polish nobility during turbulent and troubled times, he was raised partly in the Ukraine, partly in the Warsaw Citadel where his father was imprisoned, partly with his parents in exile in one of those northern Russian towns you hope you never have to see, and mostly—following the death of his parents—in Poland by an uncle.
He was a sickly child and a poor student. His first language was Polish, his second was French, and while he was introduced to English at eight by his father, who was translating Shakespeare to earn money, and while he read English-language novels (notably Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper) he never really learned the tongue he is so famous for until he was already in his twenties and working for the British Merchant Marine. Yet by 1895, when he was only thirty-eight, he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.
Ask me if I could write Goodnight Moon or The Cat in the Hat in Polish.
Conrad followed Almayer’s Folly with eighteen other novels (nineteen, if you count an unfinished one that was published posthumously) and a memoir, A Personal Record. The book published in this country as The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle was only his third novel. It may not be quite in the same league as The Heart of Darkness, but baby, it comes close and it explores some of the same themes. It also contains what is universally acclaimed as the most accurate and harrowing description of a violent storm and the sailors’ desperate attempts to save the boat and their own lives. That description certainly got my attention.
The real title is not The Children of the Sea. Nor was it published under that bowdlerized title in this country (by Dodd, Mead & Co.) out of sensitivity for the feelings of minorities, but rather for purely mercantile reasons, Dodd, Mead & Co. correctly assuming no one would purchase a book in America in 1897 that might be presumed from the title to be about a black man.
Which brings me to the real title and the difficulty of writing a review about this and some other works of genius.
Readers of my blog might recall that I wrote a review of Liza Mundy’s Code Girls that was banned (my review, I mean) by Amazon because I quoted the title of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song, Woman Is the N(five letters deleted) of the World.
And that in turn brings me to the crux of the issue, not only for this extraordinarily brilliant novel by one the English language’s greatest practitioners, but for a host of other novels as well.
The N….. of the Narcissus (Conrad’s title) makes liberal use of the word that got me banned from Amazon. The book is scarcely read today and almost never taught in any classroom at any level because of that word. And apparently, in 2009, some well-intentioned, touchy-feely, up-to-the-politically-correct-minute, progressive publisher brought out a version entitled, The N-Word of the Narcissus, in which the offending word was completely excised.
Thereby excising one of the primary themes of the book.
The title character—title only, not central—is James Wait, a black man who is hired on to the Narcissus as an able-bodied seaman for a voyage out of Bombay and headed for London. (The book is loosely based on Conrad’s experiences during an actual voyage from Bombay to Dunkirk.) It turns out Wait has tuberculosis and he becomes seriously ill during the voyage, unable to work, and his condition becomes the mirror, if you will, in which the other sailors see themselves, each his own individual reflection, some responding with sympathy and concern, some with indifference, and some—in particular an odious little trouble-making Cockney—with resentful animosity, each according to his personality. Part of Conrad’s genius is that he makes Wait neither sympathetic nor even particularly pleasant, so that the indifference of some of the other sailors is understandable, and the compassion of others more pronounced. When the Narcissus is capsized and partially submerged during a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, five of the sailors risk their lives to save Wait, even though by then most of them realize he is dying.
The anonymous narrator (who is himself one of the sailors) and the other men use the forbidden word casually and frequently, so let’s look at why one of the English language’s greatest writers should have picked that particular word when there were so many other choices.
First, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, especially among working folk, that word was common currency and it did not carry the weight it does today. Yes, it was considered even then to be condescending and vaguely belittling, but it was not an insult in the way it is today. So just as in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness or Twain’s The Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn, to take two analogous examples, the word is used in The N….. of the Narcissus because it was lingua franca in that time, and to condemn either Conrad or Twain for being products of their time would be comparable to condemning Shakespeare for writing in iambic pentameter.
But there is another side to both Conrad and Twain that today’s oh-so-sensitive and politically correct progressive types seem to be unable to grasp, and that side can be summed up by the correct usage of the word “irony,” meaning—as it is supposed to mean and so rarely does—an utterance intended to convey a deliberate contrast between the apparent and intended meanings expressed by the speaker or author. The N….. of the Narcissus, The Heart of Darkness, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are all books about the essential humanity of man, with the last two specifically and clearly condemning racism. How better to show racism, be it mild or virulent, conscious or unconscious, then to show the inadvertent and unthinking attitudes of the racists you are condemning?
Think about it. In Huck Finn, it is the runaway slave, Jim, who is the moral compass of the book, who shows Huck (and through Huck, the readers) the humanity and dignity that both characters (Huck and Jim) have never been shown themselves, and the moment when Huck makes up his mind to do the “wrong” thing and help Jim escape even if he, Huck, has to go to hell for it, is the turning point—and primary message—of that book.
In The Heart of Darkness, all the whites, including the narrator, Marlow, use the word as casually as it was customarily used in those days, but Conrad is condemning the horrifying brutality of the Belgian government and King Leopold in the Congo. The white “pilgrims” and the “company managers” are portrayed consistently and variously as rapacious, callous, murderous, and imbecilic, shooting blacks for fun or working them to death. Kurtz’s last words, “The horror! The horror!” are Marlow’s (and Conrad’s) reactions to King Leopold’s policies.
And in The N….. of the Narcissus, it is the truly hateful character in the novella, the whining and odious Cockney, Donkin, who is the only one who turns against the dying Wait. The others respond like human beings, some more empathetic than others, just as all humans vary in character, each according to his essential personality and moral core, but all behaving morally.
Anyone who condemns these books as racist because of their use of a commonly used word in the time in which they were written, or who condemns them as being too upsetting or disturbing for today’s students, needs to take a long look at himself or herself in the mirror, just as Conrad’s sailors had to see themselves in the mirror of the dying James Wait.
1,055 reviews56 followers
This 1897 novel (better called a novella) was written just three years after Conrad completed his ten years at sea, during which he served in both the French and the British merchant marine. It is his third literary production, but the first which is set almost exclusively at sea. While Almayer’s Folly and Outcast of the Islands probe psychological issues in colonial settings, this work does what Conrad explains in his preface as the most important task of a writer: to help his reader see. Unlike the previous works, it is written in first person, though the character of the narrator, who continually refers to the crew of the vessel as ‘we’, is never delineated in any significant way. The point is to see the nature of his shipmates, and their reactions to the troubles they encounter.
Like stories set in prisons, on submarines or in jury rooms, those set on ships allow for an intense analysis of the interplay of human personalities. In this story, the characters of James Wait, the titular figure; Donkin, a thorough slacker and scoundrel; Captain Allistoun, a diminutive yet powerful leader; Old Singleton, who has spent all but a matter of months of the last forty-five years at sea;, the religious zealot/cook Podmore; the mates Baker, who grunts during every speech and Creighton, who has problems controlling his temper; the passionately devoted Belfast; the largely silent Norwegian brothers and finally the supposed Finn Wamibo, whom nobody seems to really understand, dominate the story, which is more about how their variant personalities bend collectively to varying circumstances than about the circumstances themselves. Conrad has few rivals in his ability to perceive the inner depths of motivation and desire in his characters.
But he also can tell a truly dramatic story. During their several months long voyage from Bombay to England round the Cape of Good Hope, several issues arise, each described in precise detail. The ship on its side, half submerged, with the Captain countermanding an order to cut the masts is one example. A frantic struggle to rescue a shipmate trapped under upturned bulwarks is another. A heavy belaying pin narrowly missing the Captain’s head when thrown during an abortive mutiny is a third. A brazen theft from the chest of a just-expired shipmate highlighting the depth of callous selfishness of one of the main characters is the final I’ll mention, though there are many, many more. Each of these tableaux is part of a brief, highly engaging story. For a relatively short novel written by a writer who never shunned from an excessive use of adjectives and adverbs to descriptive scenes and situations, and had no compunction about spinning out paragraphs a full page-or-two long, there is a truly substantial amount of action.
But it is in his writing that Conrad’s real genius most purely manifests itself. I know of no prose writer who matches his ability to churn out a sentence with nuance piled upon top of nuance so that the description is so subtle yet so full of meaning. Often, I find myself rereading sentences I have just finished so that their gush of vocabulary will flow over me one more time. Just one example, from the dozens I could have chosen, describes the night after the storm, with the ship listing half into the ocean, under the stars which ‘remote in the eternal calm they glittered hard and cold above the uproar of the earth; they surrounded the vanquished and tormented ship on all sides; more pitiless than the eyes of a triumphant mob, and as unapproachable as the hearts of men.’
A word about the ‘n’ world of the title. James Wait, to whom it refers, is only one of several major characters, and the title thus somewhat of a misnomer. The collective crew was itself far more of a real character than any one individual. Also, this particular word seems to carry with it an excessive load of emotional import which similar epithets (the ‘l’ word for Englishmen, the ‘f’ word for Frenchmen,, the ‘w’ for Italians, the ‘c’ for Chinese, the ‘s’ for Spanish etc.) do not seem to transmit. Conrad’s broad humanity, his essential cosmopolitan outlook and his emphasis on the internal, moral attributes of character over any external feature precludes any validity of a charge of racism on his part.
An excellent work. Highly recommended. Not as complex or as insightful as Almayer, Outlast, Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, but still absolutely wonderful!
1,087 reviews32 followers
A beautifully written book (admittedly with possible the worst title imaginable, which is why I chose this ironically censored title to review), though admittedly very dense in its prose, slowing my reading to a crawl. I found the book to be a fascinating look at how a ship in this time as a law and an entity unto itself, a tiny society, representing both the noble and the reprehensible through Conrad's skillful use of layers of meaning and allegory on their journey to the "Mother of Ships," that is, Britain. Throughout the book we are assaulted by characters that are curious, repellant, stoic, evangelistic, humanistic, and cruel, representing a tiny part of all the evils and otherwise of Western Society at the time. I'm not sure if my interpretation of the book is terribly 'correct,' but it seems to deal with mortality, aspersions to the afterlife (or futility of life and its associated toil?)through the ship's cook and the curious character of James Wait. I'd recommend it if you are a fan of Joseph Conrad, otherwise you might be better off avoiding it. I read it as I intend to slowly work through his body of written work in the order it was written after being enchanted by Heart of Darkness as a child.
65 reviews4 followers
This book was a tough slog. If I didn't like Conrad so much, I may never have finished it. The book really takes its sweet-ass time getting to the point! But Conrad wants us, like the characters, to question what the whole point of busting our asses doing whatever it is we do if we all just end up dying in the end. Eventually, Conrad gets around to providing an answer, but I think he wants the reader to fumble around in the dark for a bit.
Some might say this should've been a short story instead of a novel. There are a lot of seemingly unnecessary passages of sailors talking about nothing. Lots of poetic flourishes about the sea. These things don't have much to do with the plot, but they really immerse you in the events of the novel. By the end, you genuinely feel like you've spent a lifetime with these characters.
It's those long passages of mundane character interaction in the middle that help give the novel's final pages their emotional resonance. The effect is truly stunning. The closing chapter rivals the best moments of any Conrad novel.
297 reviews8 followers
Conrad knows how to describe the sea, blemme! And the small communities of men that sailed it in pre-modern times “when the ships were made of wood and the men were made of steel”. Nowadays of course, this is reversed.
Harsh weather aside, the journey of the ‘Narcissus’ from Bombay to London was complicated by the presence of two characters, Waits (‘the Nigger’) and Donkin (a freeloader), that have their corrosive influence on the crew’s morale to the point of near-mutiny. Yeah sure the N word is flung about a bit in this 1897 book, but not used as a racial slur, or not as I read it anyway. One needs to make allowances for early books such as these. The Finns and Scandinavians on board are stereotyped worse, in a way.
All in all this book offers an interesting study of the sea, of men at sea, of men among men, of changing traditions, of experience and inexperience. And a fine example of early Conrad’s ability to make howling gales come to life, as in his command performance ‘Typhoon’ which was written much later in life.
This famous story, despite several instances of religious and ethnic stereotyping in its characterizations, is really about the fellowship of hardship, danger and skill shared by sailors on a voyage from Bombay to England on a sailing ship. The title character, James Wait, (or Jimmy as his shipmates call him) claims deathly illness to avoid the hard labor and almost causes a mutiny as the captain deals with the situation in a way most of the men disapprove. Donkin, the bad guy, is very well and scornfully drawn. As frequently is seen with this author, there is vivid, suspenseful action writing in connection with bad weather at sea. The preface is a credo of Conrad's artistic aims which stands on its own as a sample of Conrad's unique eloquence.
101 reviews618 followers
An absolutely engrossing tale that takes place on board of the Narcissus, a ship bound for England. It explores the microcosm on board of this ship and examines human nature and power relations as more and more strain is put on the crew. While the language was sometimes very dense and hard to get through (and I struggled with the nautical terms, despite there being a glossary), it was such a rewarding reading experience in the end. Dark and fascinating.
174 reviews250 followers
I'M FREEEEEEEE WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY FUCKING LIFE [had to read it for uni. never again]
319 reviews16 followers
My thoughts on reading the unfortunately named “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’” by Joseph Conrad were not only that this 1897 novella is a gripping tale of sailors and the sea in the late 19th century but that incredibly English was the author’s third language. Born in a Poland carved up by Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, Conrad spoke and wrote Polish and French as a boy but did not pick up English until he was 20 years old.
Conrad uses the vast inventory of English words in his wonderful descriptions of the sailing ship “Narcissus” as it travels for several months with its cargo from Bombay to London by way of the treacherous Cape of Good Hope. Conrad even has the skills to represent the different accents of crew members.
“Next morning, at daylight, the ‘Narcissus’ went to sea. … The loose upper canvas blew out in the breeze with soft round contours, resembling small white clouds snared in the maze of ropes.”
“A multitude of stars coming out into the clear night peopled the emptiness of the sky. They glittered, as if alive above the sea; they surrounded the running ship on all sides; more intense than the eyes of a staring crowd; and as inscrutable as the souls of men.”
Has there ever been a better description of a sailing ship bouncing from one massive wave to another during a typhoon than this?: “At times she soared up swiftly as if to leave this earth forever, then during the interminable moments fell through a void with all the hearts on board her standing still, till a frightful shock, expected and sudden, started them off again with a big thump.”
The book is not only a vivid sea story but as well a psychological drama. We see how the crew members interact with each other, the captain, and the ship, which is really another character in the novella, during calm and stormy seas. Conrad captures characteristics of crew members with succinct description such as this: “Singleton lived untouched by human emotions. Taciturn and unsmiling, he breathed amongst us – in that alone resembling the rest of the crowd.”
Or this passage about the captain: “Captain Allistoun, serious, and with an old red muffler round his throat, all day long pervaded the poop. At night, many times he rose out of the darkness of the companion, such as a phantom above a grave, and stood watchful and mute under the stars, his nightshirt fluttering like a flag – then, without a word, sank down again.”
Conrad’s sea tale is riveting even more than 115 years after the book was written. He packs this great story, with its authentic terminology of sailing, telling descriptions of the crew, and vivid accounts of the extremes of weather encountered during the voyage, into a mere 161 pages.
715 reviews1 follower
This book reminded me a lot of Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville. In both this book and Bartleby, the "main" character is a MacGuffin to lead you into what the book is really about. However, Conrad was astute enough not to name the book "The MacGuffin of the Narcissus", even though it might end up on more high school reading lists with that title...
(sidenote: since I am writing this in 2011 I cannot unselfconsciously use the N-Word when writing about the antagonist - I can get all postmoderny and try to justify it as anti-reader-response theory and I'm "channeling" Conrad in the spirit of the 1890's...blah blah blah...but in the end...nah.)
The N of the N in my opinion is mostly about the crew of the Narcissus - who see James Wait (the N) as a (black?) mirror of their own conditions - hence Conrad's unsubtle leading name of the ship. We are left in the dark about the truth of James Wait - was he really sick the whole time? Was he really a grifter? Did he get sick only after the Captain exiled him? But what is clear are the reactions of the crew to Wait. Some see him as a lost soul, some as only a grifter, some as an inscrutable alien, and probably only one crew member sees him as a complex mixture containing multitudes (and not just the narrator). This crew member is the one really affected by Wait's death at the end. But, again, was it love for Wait or for himself for loving Wait that caused his reaction?
The crew is fixated on Wait as a totem of how they are dealing with life on the Narcissus - why are they working for the bosses? Are they in solidarity with a fellow crew member or against him for not working? What is the right response? Does it depend on what we assume or what is real? And how do we know what is real?
This psychological turbulence is reflected by the sea. The sea and the ship are treated as character in their own right. Conrad in fact anthropomorphizes them brilliantly in the ship disaster. One could look at the sea and ship as allegories to the impersonal forces we are useless against - but yet have to struggle with.
As always with Conrad - this high school term paper analysis could go on and on - but it is all a sideshow to how he can really write a good story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
515 reviews200 followers
***SPOILERS ALERT***
I enjoyed this book even though it was a tough read. It is one of those novellas that feels like a really big book. It was like a men on a mission sort of story set on a merchant ship as it travels from Bombay to England. The sailors violent interactions with each other within the confines of the ship and their struggles to save the ship from the terrible storm takes up much of the pages. Jim Waite, a West Indian sailor is the character in the book's title. His arrival and subsequent deterioration of health turns the crew against each other. They are rallied by a cunning new sailor named Donkin who nearly incites them to rebellion. The conversations between the sailors reminded me of the play The Hairy Ape (published 25 years after Nigger of the Narcissus first came out), which I read a few years ago.
Conrad's characterizations deserve special mention. The aloof veteran sailor Singleton is one of the standout characters in this novella. I liked the way Conrad associated Singleton with the sea and described his physique and demeanor and developed his character through interactions (or lack of) with other sailors. I could imagine Ray Winstone or Mickey Rourke as Singleton. The breathtaking descriptions of the ship and the sea during the storm might have inspired many filmmakers and special effects people over the years. It is almost horrifying, much like Conrad's description of the jungle in Heart of Darkness. The sea is beautiful yet monstrous.
The book is not without its shortcomings. Jim Waite's sickness and constant whining and the crew's conflicted reactions to his drama becomes tiring after a while. The book ends with a procedural description of how the ship is docked and employees are paid. The final page is an ode by the first person narrator to his fellow sailors whom he might never see again.
894 reviews33 followers
A voyage from East to West. A voyage through life. A voyage into eternity. Conrad takes the reader along all three journeys. Along with Lord Jim, I feel The Nigger of "Narcissus" captures the author at his height and in his most pure form. Another one of his shorter works, a novella, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" condenses into just over a hundred or so pages the style and preoccupations that will characterize most of his later work. The shifting perspectives, the psychological observations, and, here, also, the notations about how shipboard crews meet and splinter, only tied by vague remembrances of endless voyages. Still, each journey in the age of sail has its own unique personality, something that is yielded from the men who man the decks, go aloft, steady the wheel, and issue commands. It is a living breathing organism. That is why there is no central protagonist, other than perhaps The Narcissus herself. The title character, the "Nigger of the Narcissus" is James Wait, a black seaman around whom the constellation of shipmates gather and in turn criticize, suspect, and find fault, before coming to realize that his journey, the final one through life, is one each must make in his own time. Alas, it is true for the reader as well. Thus the novel has a sense of the cosmic about it. All supported by the at times lyrical nature of the prose. And, too, there are times when Conrad joins hands with Kipling, in this story, when depicting lives heretofore unacknowledged and often discarded. In this work, they all live and breathe together, and give The Narcissus a sense of mission, a vital organism if only for a few months before the ship takes on a new lot and the former crew disbands to new duties ashore or aboard new vessels.
literature-american-19th-century literature-british-19th-century
582 reviews19 followers
The title is unnecessarily provocative to a modern reader. James Waite is a noble and respected central character, totally out of line with the assumptions evoked by the derisory title. And very unfortunately, this book has been almost completely overlooked.
This is Conrad’s 3rd book, it was 1897, he was still writing from relative obscurity two years before Heart of Darkness, but here he wrote some of his most beautiful prose.
“The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off—disappeared; intent on its own destiny. The sun looked upon her all day, and every morning rose with a burning, round stare of undying curiosity. She had her own future; she was alive with the lives of those beings who trod her decks; like that earth which had given her up to the sea, she had an intolerable load of regrets and hopes. On her lived timid truth and audacious lies; and, like the earth, she was unconscious, fair to see—and condemned by men to an ignoble fate. The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as if guided by the courage of a high endeavour. The smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent of time. The days raced after one another, brilliant and quick like the flashes of a lighthouse, and the nights, eventful and short, resembled fleeting dreams.”