| The central concern of this study is to describe how Conrad's "doubles" are related to the phenomenon of "narcissism" or a "narcissistic vision" and how Conrad uses the motif of homo duplex to manifest his own vision of human nature. Generally speaking, writers of the literature of doubles, so popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually juxtapose two characters; the first self is the socially acceptable or conventional character, while the second self or the double represents the antisocial, anarchic, irrational, or illicit character. What matters most in handling the issue of Conrad's doubleness, however, is to understand from what viewpoint the first self sees his second self. This question of point of view is related to the first self's narcissistic way of seeing. If narcissism is about one's relation to one's image, Conradian narcissism is about the first self's relation to what the self assumes to be his double or what he assumes to be a reflection of his innermost feelings or thoughts. This study investigates from the perspective of narcissism Conrad's use of double relationships appearing in "The Secret Sharer," "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and Victory.;What emerges from the investigation of these five works is that the phenomenon of narcissism is not only confined to the relation of the first self to the second self, but is more broadly significant in the relation of the first self to objects, events, situations, or nature. The yellow-dog episode of Lord Jim and the "thou-vile-wretch" episode of Under Western Eyes are a case in point. In both situations a Conradian protagonist, gripped by his own sense of guilt and shame, mistakenly takes another man's innocent remarks as directed at himself and in his distress brings about the central events of the novel. In other words, the Conradian narcissist allows his imagination or vision to be governed by an intensely subjective picture of the world. The resulting state of mind causes the denouements of the works--conclusions which are usually catastrophic. This issue of narcissism, along with the motif of the double, I believe, gives us some fascinating insights not only into the nature of Conrad's literary imagination, but also into the life of Conrad as a self-exiled Pole who consciously or unconsciously projected his own sense of homo duplex into his works of fiction. |
