Karain, “Karain: A Memory”
The title character is a Malay chieftain, emotionally haunted by the guilt of killing his close friend in order to protect the life of the other man’s sister and her Dutch lover. Karain’s memory is of being in love with the sister the guilt which haunts him forever is complex and complicated as it deals not just with having to choose to sacrifice one person over another, but misleading the brother into why he had joined him in the hunt for his fugitive sibling in the first place.
Arsat, “The Lagoon”
Native Malay man who calls the jungle looking out over the title body of water his home. As his wife nears death from fever, he relates the story of how he saved her from punishment by the island’s leader while at the same time making the decision to sacrifice his own brother to the leader’s legion of pursuing warriors.
Yanko Goorall, “Amy Foster”
He is a foreigner who survives a shipwreck and makes his way to a British coastal community where after a time he manages to learn a little English and explains his name means “little John” and that he comes from a mountainous area. Most of the villagers remain suspicious and wary, but one young woman named Amy Foster continually shows him kindness and eventually they marry and have a child. One day he falls ill and seems to be in throes of a kind of madness in which he keeps repeating the same gibberish over and over. Amy fears for her child’s safety and leaves him. Upon his death, it is learned that the gibberish he kept spouting was the word “water” in his native language.
The Commanding Officer and the Northman, “The Tale”
“The Tale” is an atmospheric sea story in which what actually happens is secondary to the significance of who is telling the story. The Commanding Officer is telling the story in retrospect to a woman one night and the story is about sailing in thick fog and unexpectedly coming across a cargo ship. When he boards it, the Northman in charge tells a believable story, but the CO remains suspicious. The story ends with his confessing to the woman that he gave the Northman directions that ensure his doom aboard the rocks rather than his safe passage and he remains haunted by never knowing if the other man was telling the truth or not.
Falk, “Falk: A Reminiscence”
The title character of this tale is one of Conrad’s most bizarre inventions. The story is another tale told out of time about a confrontation between two ship captains, Hermann and Falk, after their ships collide when Falk moves to leave port prematurely. It turns out that Falk has done much more and much worse and and all for the sake of his primal lust for Herman’s young niece. This very strange story turns on a negotiated settlement between the two for Falk’s right to marry the niece. The negotiation hinges upon Falk’s demand that the girl hears his very darkest secret: that he once engaged in cannibalism. Things just get stranger from that point.
