Conclusion

The chapter reads the tensions observed throughout this study with recent critical re-evaluations of human experience. Conrad’s art, and the modernism with which it is associated, have long been read as centering on questions of knowledge and truth, concealment and revelation, doubt and the desire to know. A more ontologically-driven thinking of modernism shows that the oscillations between Being and Becoming are meaningful not only as competing forces in critical practice and philosophical discourse, but as a gauge for significant changes in the way we engage with and represent the world. Conrad’s writing unmoors time from its chronological measure, frees the subject of the limits of the Cartesian cogito, and abandons telos in the charting of narrative form. Where conceptual logic cancels out difference in an attempt to create a coherent, recognizable picture, Conrad’s work repeatedly returns to the life force of difference.