Voyaging in Joseph Conrad’s Major Works

Joseph Conrad is one of the most intriguing and important modernist novelists and short story writers, whose writing continues to preoccupy readers. Conrad combined his unique personal background as a Polish emigre, his personal experiences and voyagings as a seaman and his literary readings with the tradition of his adopted country to produce literary works and fictions, which blended with his distinctive taste, gave the English novel a further originality and development. This study, which primarily concentrates on four of Conrad's major works - Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, “The Secret Sharer,” and The Shadow Line shows that Conrad conceives voyaging as a symbolic means, an insight and vision into the human psyche. It becomes a journey into the inner-world of man’s psychological diving into his inner world of the self in quest of truth, of self-identity, self-knowledge, and self-control.