Suspicious of absolutes, Conrad consistently demonstrated the difficulty of universalizing human experience, whether it be objects of consciousness or ethical laws. Nevertheless, he could not accept nihilism, and in humanity and their activities, he finds a means to exist in an indifferent universe. In this way, he was influenced by his times. Born into the perceived certainty of the world of science and the tradition of western civilization, he witnessed the gradual erosion of this certainty into a world of skepticism and relativity in which most long-held assumptions about the nature of human existence came into question. He saw that neither the received truths of society nor the seeming certainty of science could stand up to the buffetings of the modern world. And yet Conrad would not let go of the moorings of an earlier time's seemingly more certain existence – not because those moorings were true nor even because they provided definitive meaning for human existence, but because their alternative was a nothingness that “would have been too dark – too dark altogether” (Y 162).

If Conrad's works are tragic, their tragedy lies in their recognition of the failure of an absolute world while still clinging to the conventions of that world. The richness of Conrad's works lies in his own vacillation between a desire for certainty and a recognition that such certainty is illusory.