Distanced Narrators
Many of Conrad’s short stories and especially those included in this collection are structured using some kind of framing device so that the actual narrative becomes a story-within-a-story or else are dependent upon some other example of what Conrad termed "several ways of telling a tale." This is not just a technical preference for Conrad nor is it entirely related to the fact that he was writing near the end of the era in which the framing device was pretty much a standard operating procedure. The distancing of the narrator actually relating the story from the events of the inner story provides Conrad with an effective mechanism for pursuing multiple strands of thematic interest including the nature of truth, reliability of memory, the haunting of the present by past events and the mysterious and ambiguous future of many of his characters. Among the stories which most notably exploit this theme are “Karain,” “The Tale,” “The Lagoon” and “Falk.”
The Foreigner’s Experience
As a Polish ex-patriate who called England home and one of the greatest writers in the English language of who didn’t even begin speaking the language until his twenties, Conrad was personally familiar with the experiences of being not just a foreigner in a strange land, but a foreigner with an accent and native tongue that seemed to inherently inspire suspicion in others. As a result, much of his fiction deals with themes that derive from characters who often lonely and isolated and alienated as a result of being a lone foreigner finding himself in a shared community of natives. The guilt that haunts the Commanding Officer in “The Tale” is a consequence of not knowing whether or not to trust that the Northman on the other ship is who he really says he is. “Amy Foster” is the most direct examination of the effect of isolation and suspicion stemming from the difficulty of communication between different cultures. The tale of “Prince Roman” who was born a Polish aristocrat only to find himself sentenced to Siberia is the most complex examination of the theme.
The Sea
The sea is almost always present in a Conrad story even when the story itself is not necessarily about sailors. In fact, a great many of Conrad’s stories are about sailors, but that is a manifestation of the convention advice to all writers: what what you know. Conrad knew sailing and so he wrote about sailor experiences in “The Lagoon,” “Falk: A Reminiscence,” “Karain” and “The Tale.” The characters populating those stories are to be expected from Conrad, but it is notable that the sea also plays a major part in the story of “Amy Foster” despite its protagonist not being a seaman. The foreigner who finds himself trying to fit into a small British coastal village is only there as the result of the sinking of a ship he was on making its way to America. “The Warrior’s Soul” features a French and Russian soldier from the Napoleonic Wars and one gets the distinct sense that if those two sides had been able to engage in naval battles rather than fighting on land, the two characters would easily have been sailors without much alteration. The thematic spine of characters called by the siren song of the sea penetrates deeply into the literature of Conrad in a way that makes many of his stories almost impossible to imagine being written without them. That “The Warrior’s Soul” proves he was capable but rarely chose to do so unless hamstrung by circumstances says much about the presence of his seaman in stories that do not often require certain characters to be sailors.
