Madness

Joseph Conrad’s life as a nomad and globe-trotter serves to connect him to the vital nerve centre of contemporary cross-cultural encounters. The terror of the ‘unknown’ and the ‘other’ and the sufferings of the homeless, the dispossessed and the exile served as a paradigm for Conrad to deconstruct the theme of madness that haunts the alienated self. The loneliness of an individual gathers substance from his Polish background and his experiences as an exile from Poland. For much of his life Conrad was a seaman; this enabled him to observe at close quarters the colonialist rapacity in Africa and other parts of the globe. The vulnerability of the ‘self’ against the ‘systems’ forms the backdrop of his fictional works. Despite the opacities about Conrad’s colonial ideology and political stand, the oppressive presence of the colonizer made it necessary for the writer to dismantle the discourse of ‘unreason’ in various locales and contexts. The present study analyses Conrad’s fiction to problematize the horrors of madness in the absence of restraints of culture and civilization and suggests a possibility for the notions of wholeness, integrity, and ‘reason’.