The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'

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The Nigger of the 'Narcissus': A Tale of the Sea is a novella by Joseph Conrad published in 1897, and has been described as marking the start of his major phase^[1]^[2].

The titular character, James Wait is a West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus sailing from Bombay to London. Wait falls ill with tuberculosis during the voyage, and his plight arouses the humanitarian sympathies of many of the crew, five of whom rescue him from his deck cabin during a storm, placing their own lives and the ship at risk. Captain Alistoun and the old sailor Singleton, on the other hand, remain concerned primarily with their duties as sailors and are indifferent to Wait's condition.

The novel is seen as an allegory about isolation and solidarity^[3], the ship's company serving as a microcosm of a social group. Conrad appears to suggest that humanitarian sympathies are at their core, feelings of self-interest^[2] and that a heightened sensitivity to suffering can be detrimental to managing a society^[3]. Cedric Watts' 1988 introduction to the book also comments that the ship is at times shown as a small planet of people and fellow living things. The start of chapter 2 supports this "...the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off — disappeared; intent on its own destiny."

In the United States, the novel was first published with the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, at the insistence by the publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, that no one would buy or read a book with the word nigger in its title^[4].

The author's preface to the novel, regarded as a manifesto of literary impressionism^[5], is considered one of Conrad's significant pieces of non-fiction writing^[4].

[edit] Notes

^ Stringer, Jenny, ed. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English.
^ ^a ^b Daiches, David (1994), A Critical History of English Literature, vol. 2 (Revised (1969) ed.), Mandarin, ISBN 0-7493-1894-5
^ ^a ^b Yates, Norris W. (1964), "Social Comment in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"", Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 79 (1): 183-185, DOI 10.2307/460979
^ ^a ^b Orr, Leonard (1999), A Joseph Conrad Companion, Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-29289-2
^ Ousby, Ian (1994), The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English (Revised (1992) paperback ed.), Wordsworth, ISBN 1-85326-336-2