The Personal Voice in Joseph Conrad's Fiction

It is something of a commonplace to say that a great part of Joseph Conrad's fictions are told by contemplative 'first-person' narrators, many of whom produce recognisably oral narratives to a listener or a group of listeners. It is also well-known that i n a smaller but important part of his works, Conrad makes use of apparently 'third-person' narrators, many of whom would also seem to deserve the traditional label 'omniscient'. However, when one takes a careful look at Conrad's oeuvre, the division of hi s works into such crude narrative categories becomes untenable. In fact, many of his fictions hover uncertainly between 'first-person' and 'third-person' narration, while there also seems to be a unifying principle underlying all his works: the personal v oice. Most readers who are familiar with Conrad's oeuvre would no doubt confirm that the voice we hear when reading a Conrad text is a recognizably human or personal one, and this is true even if the narrator of the text in question does not appear as a c haracter in the world of the story. Yet to pin down the personal voice analytically or to offer a convincing interpretation of it is as difficult as it is easy to notice it. Unsurprisingly, the significance of the personal voice as a textual principle has suffered from comparative neglect. In my project, I suggest it is time to recognise the personal voice as deeply significant in Conrad's oeuvre for all its technical as well as thematic relevance, and because an awareness of it inevitably makes us better readers of Conrad. It is partly through the personal voice that Conrad's fiction dramatises the importance of narrating as a fundamental human capability and explores how we construct our identities by telling ourselves stories about our own lives. Durin g my stay in Trondheim, I will be assisted in my research by Professor Jeremy Hawthorn, who is an internationally recognised authority on Conrad as well as narrative theory.