This chapter will engage some commonplaces of Conrad scholarship in order to initiate a new line of inquiry into the writer's exploration of language and subjectivity. The analysis will trace the emergence of a new subject and the manner in which its ontological permutations determine the rethinking of plot and event in Conrad's fiction. Such a rereading of Conrad is informed by a quandary that infects literary endeavour well into late modernism. As Samuel Beckett commented: ‘The material of experience is not the material of expression and I think the distress you feel, as a writer, comes from a tendency on your part to assimilate the two.’ Drawing from a number of canonical texts including The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim and Victory, the chapter will show that the categorical separation between experience and expression – and the problem it poses for an early modernist writer such as Conrad – is everywhere evident in the thematic and stylistic makeup of his fiction. Much has been said about the epistemological uncertainty arising from this divide and the literary techniques to which it gives rise, impressionism and delayed decoding being two familiar examples. This study focuses rather on its distinct ontological articulations in the refashioning of plot, narrative voice and character.

Reframing the above-mentioned works in accord with Beckett's insight will demand we read against three of the mainstays of Conrad criticism. First, Lord Jim will be read not as evolving around a series of revisitations of Jim's seminal jump off the Patna but as a serial restaging of an altogether different moment of inception in the novel. Marlow describes his initial meeting with Jim as an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other.