Narrativizing the "Other": Joseph Conrad’s Art of Story-telling in Almayer’s Folly

This paper proposes to focus on Joseph Conrad’s narrative style in his first novel Almayer’s Folly, which has been so far neglected by most mainstream critics. Conrad’s narratives employ different narrative techniques in different texts that complicate the attempt to generalize about his narrative method or style. Still some distinctive features are common in his narratives. Critics so far agree to his modernist style that links the narrators with the characters as well to explore the deep psychology of both. When most of them find Conrad’s narrators as unreliable and reflexive especially in his Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and some other Western fictions, this essay investigates the author’s style in his debut novel, and drawing on Edward Said’s idea of “secular criticism”, finds a “secular style” of telling the story, by which Conrad achieves a kind of narrative detachment from the text and lends his narrators a transnational identity. By hiding the authorial identity and narrator’s location and racial or national perspectives, Conrad gains the confidence of his readers across the globe. That is why in the Malay trilogy, he makes his narrators nationless, and hence makes them appear as limited omniscient narrators who satirize the dominant cultural, racial, religious and political ideologies, especially the Western Imperialist hegemony. This is what makes Conrad both a writer of the East and the West. This paper critically evaluates this secular style of fiction writing in Almayer’s Folly.