Conrad's fictions are often structured by a decision and its consequences or by a voyage, literal or figurative. His central characters approach or resist a crucial decision, increased self-knowledge, or deeper insight into an enigmatic person or situation. Paired characters, symbols, allusions to myth and literature, manipulations of time sequence, and single or multiple narrators help him probe individual experiences and link them to public events and the human condition.
The life of Joseph Conrad--a native of the Polish Ukraine who grew up under Russian rule, spoke fluent French, and became a major modern author in English--is as rich and complex as his writing. His fiction and his two autobiographical sketches, The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions (1906) and A Personal Record, offer valuable, if not fully reliable, information, and he remains enigmatic in the best biographies, those by Jocelyn Baines, Frederick R. Karl, Zdzislaw Najder, and Jeffrey Meyers. Karl identifies the "three lives" of his subject: an unsettled Polish-Russian childhood, an adventurous young adulthood as a French and British merchant seaman, and a troubled maturity as the British novelist Joseph Conrad, whose subjects derive from his young-adult experience but whose themes are rooted also in his childhood.
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