otherwise remained unseen, transcribing exotic locales and bewildering customs to his British peers. It has been left to current critics to decipher what his writings reveal about political prejudices underlying imperial rule as nineteenth century values began to collapse (Said 162-168; Bivona 151-169).
A contemporary hermeneutical approach yields an excavation site distinguished by its multiple layerings, anthropologically offering a reading which in revisting British empirical rule determines that the ambivalence in Conrad's teeter-tottering style should be assessed within the dualism of its alternating bouts of representing British decorum, first compliance predictably to be followed by antagonistic revolt against its dictums. This essay will focus on a full-bodied analysis of characters in Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Victory, "Heart of Darkness" and "The Nigger of the Narcissus" as a way of appraising Conrad's ambivalence toward human nature and its variable responses to imperial, bureaucratic and colonial influences. Refusing to transform his characters into political caricatures, Conrad proffers studies infused with a rare sympathy, intending to render fully the value of an often overlooked idiosyncratic appreciation of character, examining how life's adversities can actually both puncture and reshape the psyche, sometimes revealing it to be maimed while at other times fortifying it. Although his characters tend to be drawn within the fated circles of disaster, he does not allow them to be flattened into satiric and contrived portraiture.
Underlying an examination of Conrad's imperialistic, bureaucratic and colonial intentions is a desire to retrieve the lost subject. Subjectivity rendered as the damaged self serves as the outcome of a world distorted by modernity's divergent types of alienation. The fundamental fault underlying bureaucracy can begin to be analyzed when its intentionality is seen as problematiz...