The Nigger of the Narcissus

With such a title, we need to at least ask, is this book racist? Well, yes, in a sort of casual way. It's titled nigger is clearly the Other, someone from the heart of darkness, but we're all connected to that darkness. He is merely here to symbolize it, and in this earlier time, a writer was allowed to help him do so by being Black. I think Čapek's War with the Newts and R. U. R. are probably racist as well and they don't have any actual races in it. But it's a literary racism which invokes our inner racism--our sense of the one who is not like us--and therefore, perhaps, evil. And at the same time, connected to us. The world is a complicated place. We are at its mercy.

Jimmie isn't a team player. He demands special privileges and he will manipulate to get them; in this case, by claiming he hasn't much longer to live, though he doesn't really believe it to be true. I think the captain believed it to be true in some larger sense and thus let himself be manipulated because of this greater truth which is borne out in the end.

That's what this book is about. On one level it's a detailed realistic yarn of the life of The Sea. Conrad had been that guy and knows how it goes. But it's also about being a human, helpless against the larger forces. And about bonding with other humans who share our fate. Or, in Jimmie's case, not doing so.

And we also have the cook who takes a more traditional religious view of the situation and tries to save Jimmie and the rest of us as well. I say "us" as if I was on the ship. Conrad's narrator was both on the ship and also privy to what happened when he wasn't around, so I can say "us" if I want to. I can elect to be one of these humans, sometimes murderously enraged about some imagined (or real) injury, at other times willing to risk my life for others. Conrad is good with the moment to moment changes in personal feelings, in how the terror of death can unite us or divide us or trivialize all that came before or all that would come later.

So it's that kind of book. Sometimes, I enjoyed it and at other times found it annoyingly over-written and old fashioned. Sometimes the casual racism angered me. But I appreciated Conrad's skill. Heart of Darkness, though, was better.