Joseph Conrad The Nigger of the Narcissus

About The Nigger of the Narcissus

Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) is his first fully achieved work of fiction — the voyage of the cargo ship Narcissus from Bombay to London, organized around the dying Black seaman James Wait, whose presence disrupts the ship's moral community. Accompanied by Conrad's famous Preface — one of the most important statements of literary aesthetics in English, arguing that fiction's task is 'before all, to make you see' — it established his moral territory for everything that followed.