Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus: A Jonah in Disguise
In times of war and destruction, courage and calm are essential, particularly in view of what is occurring in our world today. In the Scripture, Jonah showed both courage and calm which led to his redemption. "But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was likely to be broken. The then mariners were afraid and cried every man to his god, and threw their wares into the sea, to lighten the vessel. Now Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship, and lay fast asleep. The shipmaster went to him, saying, 'What do you mean? O sleeper? Arise, call upon your God, so that we will not perish.' And they said to each other, 'Come and let us cast lots, so that we may know why this evil is upon us.' Thus, they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. So they cast him into the sea; and the waters ceased from their raging." The account from the Old Testament book of Jonah bears a strong resemblance to Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus. Conrad too begins his tragic tale of the sea with images of chaos, anger and frustration, as the desperate crew also wonders what to do with fellow mariner named James Wait. The author commences his narrative with a description of the Narcissus as its mates await their departure from Bombay. The author contrasts what he calls the "peace of the East with the petulant sailors as they argue over prices of materials and merchandise aboard the ships." In the author's words, "The resplendent and be-starred peace of the East was torn into squalid tatters by howls of rage and shrieks of lament raised over sums ranging from five annas to half a rupee; and every soul afloat in Bombay Harbor became aware that the new hands were joining the Narcissus" (Conrad 18). To enhance the degree of verisimilitude, Conrad combines numerous seafaring expressions with descriptions of nautical equipment and shipping terminology. In essence, he utilizes details to enhance the credibility of the story, as did Fielding and Defoe in the early eighteenth century. The following dialogue provides a typical example of his use of realistic detail: "Here, sonny, take that bunk! . . . Don't you do it! . . . What's your last ship? . . . I know her . . . Three years ago, in Puget Sound . . . This here berth leaks, I tell you! . . . Come on; give us a chance to swing that chest! . . . Did you bring a bottle, any of you shore toffs? . . . Give us a bit of 'baccy . . . I know her; her skipper drank himself to death . . . He was a dandy boy! . . . Liked his lotion inside, he did!" (19). Conrad's physical description of the sailors furthermore contributes to the sense of realism: "Men in black jackets and stand-up collars, mixed with men bare-footed, bare-armed, with colored shirts open on hairy chest, pushed against one another in the middle of the forecastle. The group swayed, reeled, turning upon itself with the motion of a scrimmage, in a haze of tobacco smoke. All were speaking together, swearing at every second word" (19). Here Conrad contrasts the rough exterior of the sailors with their sensitivity over the welfare of a dying fellow sailor James Wait. In the Old Testament account, Jonah was different from the other members of the crew because he was Jewish. Racism in his case further contributed to the mariners' sense of fear and resentment. In contrast, Conrad's scapegoat is of African descent, and as with Jonah, the sailors' prejudice and superstition toward him causes them considerable anxiety and consternation. Indeed, Wait's itself name itself suggests the most tragic aspect of the sailors' ordeal in trying to determine what to do with him. As each of the shipmates attempts to decide whether he should condemn or justify the sick man, their inner tension intensifies, and they vacillate from an initial hatred and indifference to one of guilt and regret at Wait's death (174-176). At one point in the voyage, the narrator says, "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" 90). In this context, Wait mirrors the guilt, cruelty, and indifference which the sailors must recognize within themselves, as well as in the victim. From one perspective, James Wait serves as the archetypal scapegoat that tragically teaches through his death. Paradoxically, from Wait's cold and lifeless corpse, the sailors learn to transcend their immaturity, and commence the phase of emotional rebirth. Speaking for the author, the narrator associates Wait with the destiny of the crew from the time he first steps aboard the Narcissus. Wait tells the crew as he first arrives, "I belong to the ship." Wait's influence was proves pervasive. The narrator says, "He influenced the moral tone of our world as though he had it in his power to distribute honors, treasures, or pain; and he could give us nothing but his contempt." Here is Conrad's irony, for as Wait's shrank more each day, his moral and spiritual influence disproportionately grew (157). From another perspective, the sailors fear that Wait's presence brings them grief, and they choose to avoid him. Initially, they resent his inability to perform his share of the duties; however, their resentment transforms into sorrow and uncertainty because they cannot discern whether he is actually sick or merely manipulating them. The narrator explains, "Men stood around very still and with exasperated eyes. It was just what they had expected, and hated to hear, that idea of a stalking death, thrust at them many times a day like a boast and like a menace by this obnoxious nigger" (52). Conrad also suggests that his appearance reveals the degree of his suffering, a foreshadowing for both the narrator and the crew. According to the narrator, "He hold his head up in the glare of the lamp—a head vigorously modeled into deep shadows and shining lights—a head powerful and misshapen with a tormented and flattened face—a face pathetic and brutal: the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive mask of a nigger's soul" (32). The author uses contrast to show how the laughter and jollity and the crew suddenly changes to sadness and thoughts of death when James Wait emerges from his room. Initially, Conrad says, "At some opinion of dirty Knowles, delivered with an air of supernatural cunning, a ripple of laughter ran along, rose like a wave, burst with a startling roar. They stamped with both feet; they turned their shouting faces to the sky; many, spluttering, slapped their thighs; while one or two, bent double, gasped, hugging with both arms like men in pain." Upon Wait's entrance, however, the tone quickly changes. According to the narrator, Donkin became "grave"; the washer-man grew "more crestfallen than an exposed backslider"; the carpenter quickly walked away; and the sail-maker, giving up his story, "began to puff at his pipe with somber determination." Wait's deathly appearance even "seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning well. The circle broke up." In essence, even Nature withdrew from Wait's repulsive image. As long as Wait remains aboard the Narcissus, the ship struggles against a cruel Nature "that drove to and fro in the unceasing endeavor to fight her way through the invisible violence of the winds" as "she pitched headlong into dark smooth hollows, . . . struggled upwards over the snowy ridges of great running seas . . . [and] rolled, restless, from side to side, like a thing in pain." (66).The watch on deck observed "dismally the high and merciless seas boarding the ship time after time in unappeasable fury' as the crew "turned out stiff to face the redeeming and ruthless exactions of their glorious and obscure fate" (67). Conrad uses these storms at sea to compare with the inner conflict occurring in the crew. For instance, he unites the two themes in the following passage: "There was no sleep on board that night. Most seamen remember in their life one or two such nights of a culminating gale. Nothing seems left of the whole universe but darkness, clamor, fury—and the ship. And like the last vestige of a shattered creation she drifts, bearing an anguished remnant of sinful mankind, through the distress, tumult, and pain of an avenging terror" (71). In this way, Conrad also unites the particular with universal to enhance his tone of loss and isolation.
Conrad compares Wait to "sick tyrant overawing a crowd of abject but untrustworthy slaves" (50-51) and adds spiritual implications when the cook realizes that "wickedness" and "Satan" were among them (54). Here, Conrad uses intentional ambiguity to confuse the reader. If Waits personifies evil, he could not serve as a scapegoat through whose death they grow emotionally. Had he acted virtuously, the fault would have resided in the crew; however, the Negro's contemptuous attitude mirrors his own inadequacies. The narrator says, "We served him in his bed with rage and humility, as though we had been the base courtiers of a hated prince; and he rewarded us by his unconciliating criticism" (53). Consequently, Wait's personality manifests itself in complexity, in the shades of good and evil. At one point of the story, the sick man's conduct is supercilious and condemning; whereas, in others, he implores the crew for help and longs for their approval. Through these contradictions, Conrad analyzes the nature of the crew's conduct and its apparent cause. Is the sailors' aloofness the result of Wait's arrogance, or the object of their prejudice? Does Wait's size and appearance reflect the enormity of their own guilt, or Wait's personal sin against Nature, so repugnant that the elements themselves retreat from his presence? The motivation for Wait's behavior, like Shakespeare's Iago, remains unclear. This ambiguity is the most poignant psychological aspect of the tale. For the shipmates, the reality of their cruelty becomes evident in his death. Wait, however, shows not apparent remorse. In fact, the very opposite seems closer to the truth. The writer says, "He became the tormentor of all our moments; he was worse than a nightmare. You couldn't see that there was anything wrong with him; a nigger does now show. He was not very fat—certainly—but then he was no leaner than other niggers we had known. He coughed often, but the most prejudiced person could perceive that, mostly, he coughed when it suited his purpose. He wouldn't, or couldn't, do his work—and he wouldn't lie-up" (60). Conrad uses this uncertainty to slowly infect the crew's spirit. Conrad uses irony to reflect the adverse effects of Wait's psychology. Had these men been totally reprobate, their consciences would have remained unaffected by the sick man's condition; however, had they not been good at heart, his poison would not have induced such guilt and grief. The following passage confirms this tragic reversal: "He overshadowed the ship. Invulnerable in his promise of speedy corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives. Had we been a miserable gang of wretched immortals, unhallowed alike by hope and fear, he could not have lorded it over us with a more pitiless assertion of his sublime privilege" (63).
Throughout the tale, the author characterizes Old Singleton, the "oldest able seaman in the ship," as the voice wisdom and experience. He serves as the Old Man of the Sea Archetype. Conrad says his "spectacles and venerable white beard" gave him the appearance of "a learned and savage patriarch, the incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of the world" (20). The author further describes Singleton as a sailor "set apart on the deck right under the lamps, stripped to the waist, tattooed like a cannibal chief all over his powerful chest and enormous biceps. Between the blue and red patterns his white skin gleamed like satin; his bare back was propped against the heel of the bowspit, and he held a book at arm's length before his big, sunburnt face . . . who had sailed to the southward since the age of twelve, who in the last forty-five years had lived (as we had calculated from his papers) no more than forty months ashore . . ." (20-21). Ironically, Conrad characterizes Singleton as the cold and indifferent hand of fate which sadly governs the author's philosophy of life. Following James Wait's death, Conrad's persona, along with the crew, recognizes the influence that the young black man exerted upon them, but not Singleton. The narrator suggests, "We had taken his chances of life so much at his own valuation that his death, like the death of an old belief, shook the foundations of our society." Conrad says that following Wait's burial at sea, the ship itself "rolled as if relieved of an unfair burden. Interestingly, the similar results occur when the crew casts Jonah into the sea. In contrast, the author says, "Singleton only was not surprised. 'Dead—is he? Of course,' he said, pointing at the island right abeam; for the calm still held the ship spell-bound within sight of Flores. Dead—of course. He wasn't surprised" (173). It was Singleton's prediction that Wait was the Jonah, that once his corpse was cast into the sea, the weather would again grow calm and peaceful. Sadly, Conrad fulfills this prophecy. As the narrator observes, "It came with the sound of a lofty and powerful sigh. The sails filled, the ship gathered way, and the waking sea began to murmur sleepily of home to the ears of men" (178). In essence, Conrad combines Singleton's fatalism with the personification of an insensitive Nature to reinforce his own tragic philosophy of life. Conrad says that Singleton "appeared bigger, colossal, very old, old as Father Time himself, who should have come into this place as quiet as a sepulcher to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep." The author also sadly describes him as "only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation." In this respect, Conrad's tone of sadness and loss suggests a yearning for an earlier period in time, when heroes and their mighty deeds achieved untold feats of honor and virtue. Singleton, in this way, represents an early version of the existential hero in the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Conrad creates an image of Singleton alone peering out into eternity, much like the Byronic Hero standing on the precipice gazing into heaven and then back to earth as he tragically laments man's physical and spiritual limitations, or Prometheus staring over the ocean from Caucasus. Referring to Singleton, the author says, "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." These defiant heroes challenged their fate, as well as the elements. According to the author, "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" (38-39). Conrad also echoes this existential sense of loss and betrayal through his characterization of Singleton as the last of a noble race, like Nimrod and the heroes of an earlier era: "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" (40). In Conrad's case, truth, love, or purpose exist solely as a matter of individual choice and perception.
Conrad characterizes of the sailors of the Narcissus as victims and outcasts, much the heroes from Steinbeck or Dostoyevsky. The following passage describes two such shipmates: "Not bad! Not bad!" screamed Belfast. "If it wasn't bad when they ain't got a chance, blast their black 'arts . . ." He foamed, whirling his arms, then suddenly grinned and, taking a tablet of black tobacco out of his pocket, bit a piece off with a funny show of ferocity. Another new hand—a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face, who had been listening open-mouthed in the shadow of the midship locker—observed in a squeaky voice:--'Well, it's a 'omeward trip, anyhow. Bad or good, I can do it on my 'ed—s'long as I get 'ome. And I can look after my rights! I will show 'em!" . . . He stood with arms akimbo, a little fellow with white eyelashes. He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if head been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth . . . and he smiled with a sense of security at the face around"(23). As the Narcissus begins its rendezvous, Conrad compares the vessel's insignificance to a beetle, an insect simile commonly used by existentialists like Kafka and Dostoyevsky to reflect the grossness and insignificance of man. Conrad says, "Twenty-six pairs of eyes watched her low broad stern crawling languidly over the smooth well between the two paddle-wheels that turned fast, beating the water with fierce hurry. She resembled an enormous and aquatic black beetle, surprised by the light, overwhelmed by the sunshine, trying to escape with ineffectual effort into the distant gloom of the land" (43). Loneliness and isolation also serve as existential elements in Conrad's tale. Shortly after the journey commences, the Narcissus finds itself "alone, heading south upon a restless sea" as it "stretched itself out through a day of immense solitude." In this sense, the small vessel's quest represents an archetypal voyage through time, in a microcosmic conflict between man and Nature. As the author expresses it, "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" (44-45). Conrad focuses upon the darker aspect of the human soul to depict the man's inner struggle for truth, and frequently employs setting and nature imagery to correspond with this darker aspect. For instance, the author says, "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" (45). In this passage, combining the sense of emptiness and inscrutability create a sinister quality of isolation and mystery. The allusion to men's souls also adds a universal significance by shifting the focus from a small crew in a single vessel to an image of paranoid man overwhelmed by the glare of a cruel and indifferent Nature. In that same description Conrad personifies the sun which looked upon the ship all day "with a burning, round stare of undying curiosity." He goes on to say, "The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage." Despite the seeming insignificance of her quest, the Narcissus drove on, "as if guided by the courage of a high endeavor." Here Conrad compares the craft to the heart of man, which must also choose to push forward with courage, despite opposition.
Unfortunately, Conrad's philosophy of life, as expressed in this seafaring tale, fails to correspond with the interpretation found in the book of Jonah. There is no redemption in this case. Instead of Jonah's successfully answering God's call to witness to the people of Nineveh, James Wait is neither saved by a whale, nor sent as a prophet. For Conrad, man's only purpose derives in a stoic acceptance of one's fate, which for him translates into a ceaseless toil and pain, sustained by what he calls dumb fear and courage. His Grand Scheme contains the illusions of justice and mercy, whose outer masks offer man a measure of comfort and grace yet underneath betray an endless struggle with emptiness and futility. Looking back upon the journey, the narrator calls these ideals "the illusions of strength, mirth, happiness, the illusion of splendor and poetry of life" (189). According to the author, "On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest. Through the perfect wisdom of its grace they are not permitted to meditate at ease upon the complicated and acrid savor of existence. They must without pause justify their life to the eternal pity that commands toil to be hard and unceasing, from sunrise to sunset, from sunset to sunrise; till the weary succession of nights and days tainted by the obstinate clamor of sages, demanding bliss and an empty heaven, is redeemed at last by the vast silence of pain and labor by the dumb fear and the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and enduring" (107). Conrad reinforces his philosophy of fatalism in Singleton's view of life: "He looked upon the immortal sea with the awakened and groping perception of its heartless might; he saw it unchanged, black and foaming under the eternal scrutiny of the stars; he heard its impatient voice calling for him out of a pitiless vastness full of unrest, of turmoil, and of terror. He looked afar upon it, and he saw an immensity tormented and blind, moaning and furious, that claimed all the days of his tenacious life, and, when life was over, would claim the worn- out body of its slave" (116).
In the closing scene of the tale, as the narrator takes his final view of the Narcissus in harbor, the author expresses both a sense of loss and hope: loss of those times in the past of great men and events long forgotten; and hope which springs from the brotherhood of men. Here is Conrad's optimism: "A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the water of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven't we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale" (190).
Works Cited for Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus
Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the Narcissus. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1914.
Russell, Bertrand. Why Men Fight. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2004.