Joseph Conrad's A Personal Record: An Anti-confessional Autobiography

Abstract

Joseph Conrad, as a well-known novelist, commencing to pen reminiscences about the beginnings of his nautical career and his first steps as an English writer, faced an essential dilemma. On one hand, the need to order and make meaningful the decisions and events from his past was so compelling that it urged the writer to create his memoirs; on the other, Conrad’s distrust of direct confession, unequivocal externalization of his intimate “self’ made him choose the literary form of loose remembrances based on apparently chaotic associations referring to people and events from the past. The result was a collection of seemingly disconnected vignettes portraying different episodes from the author’s days of yore. The aim of this paper is firstly, to establish to what extent Conrad’s volume, A Personal Record, is an autobiography, secondly, to consider whether it is possible to create an anticonfessional autobiography, and last but not least, to disclose the techniques that Conrad uses to reduce the confessional character of his recollections. [fragm. tekstu]