SOURCE: Bonney, William. “Contextualizing and Comprehending Joseph Conrad's ‘The Return’.” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (winter 1996): 77-90.

In the following essay, Bonney argues that Conrad's story “The Return” is “a quality work of art.”

There is nothing behind the curtain other than that which is in front of it.

—G. W. F. Hegel

“It's death to come back. There's been overmuch of coming back of late. …”

—Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations)

There are few works by Joseph Conrad that have been so consistently neglected, if not hastily condemned, as the short story “The Return.”¹ This is unfortunate, because if this tale is experienced within appropriate conceptual and technical contexts, it proves to be a quality work of art. Conrad's fiction consistently generates a context of anxious yearning for reassurance, if not certitudes, in a cosmos embodying primarily recalcitrant transformations—“the immensity of … vague and burning desire” (NN 134),² “all mankind...