Three of the stories included in this collection originally appeared along with two others which are not in a collection titled Tales of Unrest. It is an appropriate title for the collection with the additional stories included here added into the mix. These stories represent the earliest phase of Conrad’s career as a writer of short fiction and even includes his very first short story, “The Idiots.” This collection would be notable for no other reason than its inclusion alone since it sticks out like a sore thumb from not just the other stories here, but most of the stories in Conrad’s body of work. Even so, it is also a story of unrest. The title characters are children who bear many of the hallmarks of autism though, of course, that term would not be invented for another fifteen years.
Like the rest of the stories in this collection, “The Idiots” is about the haunting of the future by the events of the past. Unlike the others, however, the future remains unwritten and it is a rare case where the “present” of the narrative takes place at the time of the crucial events. That is just one aspect that makes it different from the rest. Others are the lack of a reference to the sea and a complex narrative perspective. The latter becomes a dominant effect over the course of the other stories which reveal the developing mastery of Conrad over the proper way to tell a story about the past from the perspective of the future.
Ultimately, that is what these stories are really about. While they would be aptly included in the previous volume, a more appropriate alternative title for this collection could be taken from a query found in the story “The Tale” in which the events on a strangely foggy night at sea create such unrest for the unnamed Commanding Officer that he is haunted forever by never knowing the truth of what really took place. If it is as he suspected, his actions could be considered heroic. If not, he is a murderer. What stimulates him to relate his tale of unrest is that simple query posed by an unnamed woman: “Why not tell me a tale?”
And that is exactly the common thread uniting all these varied narratives: they are tales of one person usually though not always being told by another. And, in the case of “Amy Foster” the narrative complexity goes three layers deeper as the key moment in the narrative has the narrator relating a doctor’s English translation of the words being spoken by the protagonist in his native foreign language. “Falk: A Reminiscence” might well be a case of being careful what you ask for. Asking the narrator of this story who not you a tale results in the single most shocking event of the past which is haunting the future: a confession of cannibalism.
Somewhat amazingly, only three years separates the original publication of “The Idiots” and the original three part serialization of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. The short stories accompanying that tale in this collection reveal the not-so-gradual intensifying of Conrad’s proficiency in manipulating the complexities of narrative point of view to effectively structure his stories. Ultimately, these stories are not just bound together as stories of unrest within the characters, but unrest within Conrad at his early failure to properly structure “The Idiots” in a way that would have significantly improved the story. The astonishing learning curve these shorter tales of Joseph Conrad exhibit in retrospect in appear to also be bound together as a template that leads inevitably and inexorably to his masterpiece of narrative complexity: his 1904 novel Nostromo.
For Conrad, the query "why not tell me a tale" is inextricably bound to his unspoken reply: "how should I tell it?"
