CONCLUSION
To view Conrad's fiction in this way as a series of alternative stances deployed logically around a central perception is to view his work as a static, completed whole. It is to stand where the reader stands after the completion of a novel: at that point where he reflects and assembles into one perspective vistas which have opened to him one by one. Such a perspective allows us to capture the internal logic of Conrad's fiction, but its sense of comprehensiveness is, on one level at least, misleading. Just as the experience of reading is defined not only by our final perspective of a work but also by the limited horizons opened by each succeeding page, so the essence of Conrad's work lies not only in a last, all-encompassing definition of his world but in the developing perspectives which each novel affords. If Conrad's work does indeed define a world, a world implicit in the first and last novel, it is one which, like all new worlds, must be explored gradually.(27)
Conrad's was a western mind, strongly infused with Latin individuality, with an English awareness of moral issues, and a sense of form rare in writers of fiction. If, as seems likely, the best of his work has lasting vitality, it will surely be for these characteristics. He would be a pessimist indeed who thought their value ephemeral.(28)
Finally, we can say that one of the reasons why Conrad's art is so powerful may indeed lie in this: that the circumstances of his youth and the force of his genius moved him again and again to its poignant re-creation.(29)
(27) ã The Metaphysics of Darkness. Foyal Roussel.
A study in the unity and development of Conrad's Fiction.
1971- The John's Hopkins Press by Baltimore and London.
Page: 27
(28) ã Joseph Conrad by Oliver Warner
Published for THE BRITISH COUNCIL and the NATIONAL BOOK LEAGUE
By Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto.
First published in 1950.
Page.32
(29) ã Eight Modern Writers. J.I.M.Steward
Oxford History of English Literature
Edited by F.P.Wilson and Banamy Dobrée
Oxford at the Clarendon Press
Oxford University Press. -1963
Page:199