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It is assumed that today the novel is the predominant form of narrative. There are many ways that the novelist may use his narrative to think for him. One obvious way is through narratorial commentary, as for instance, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Another way is through structural manipulation, as in the two narratives of Dickens’s Bleak House. A third possibility, the one to be investigated in the case of Conrad, is to use the sjuzhet to disrupt thoroughly the chronology of the fabula. This is not done merely to enhance the mysteriousness of the text, but to make it think for the novelist by evoking central thematic concerns. This mode of thinking will be discussed in relation to Lord Jim and Nostromo.
H. M. Daleski (1926-2010), Professor Emeritus of English after teaching for forty years at the Hebrew University, is the author of The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (1965), Dickens and the Art of Analogy (1970), Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession (1977), The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels (1984), Unities: Studies in the English Novel (1985), Thomas Hardy and the Paradoxes of Love (1997), and a great number of scholarly articles, the last published of which are “Narratorial Border Crossings in Major Early-Twentieth-Century English Novels,” Poetics Today 30/2 (2009): 237-55 and “Dickens and the Comic Extraneous,” Connotations 18: 1–3 (2008–2009): 208–14.
