Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

In Chance and Victory, Conrad's subject matter is less his own life than the external world. The form and narrative technique stress his detachment and withdrawal. Even when he revives Marlow in Chance, that figure is no longer a surrogate who echoes his own anxieties and doubts. Although we certainly see important resemblances between Conrad and his characters Heyst and Captain Anthony, he is not primarily writing about fictional versions of himself. Chance, the first novel after the three major political novels, sustains and intensifies the stress on private life and passionate love as the only alternatives to a world threatened by materialism, political ideology, and uncontrollable historical forces. In Chance, as in Conrad's earlier novels, each is lonely, isolated and separate, and requires the recognition of another as friend, lover, parent, child, or counsel to complete him. If there is an alternative in Chance to repression, isolation, and self-imprisonment, it is in the possibility of sympathy and understand -709- ing, and, most significantly, passionate love ...»