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A recurrent weakness in several of Conrad's novels is that he makes the villains too caricatural, like figures from melodramas. The narrator practically invites us to boo and hiss them. Vivid but grotesque, they force their disruptive way through predominantly realistic narratives.

In Almayer's Folly, there is the slinking Cornelius. In Lord Jim, there is the “scourge of God,” Gentleman Brown. In Nostromo, it is General Sotillo, with Pedrito Montero not far behind. The Secret Agent offers a gallery of grotesques: the obese Michaelis, the venomous but impotent Karl Yundt, and Comrade Ossipon, who could serve as an illustration in a tome by his mentor, Cesare Lombroso, doyen of anthropological criminology. In Victory, the villainous trio, Gentleman Jones, Ricardo and Pedro, seem to have trespassed into a realistic novel from a lurid stage-melodrama. In Under Western Eyes, Nikita (“Necator”) is a sadistic monster. In The Arrow of Gold, the grotesque is Ortega; in The Rover, it is Scevola. In The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in contrast, James Wait's ambiguity helps to make him the plausible centre of the ship's divisions and strife, and, eventually, the text depicts his fear of death in a sympathetically realistic way (aided by borrowings from French fiction, in particular the description of the death of Forestier in Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami). Wait stands predominantly on the realistic side of caricature, though with the occasional lapse. It is Donkin who is the opprobrious grotesque. Wait, whose complexion is black, is bad enough; but Donkin, who is very white in complexion (being albino, with white eyelashes), is far worse: eventually he abuses and robs the dying man. When ashore, the crew refuse to drink with him.

With The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Conrad rapidly reached maturity as a novelist: this is the start of his major phase. Though animus pushes Donkin to the caricatural, the narrative is predominantly realistic; it is also allegoric and symbolic; and it is vividly imagined: complex and rich in implication. It imprints on memory a series of starkly-lit images: Conrad has certainly learnt from what he termed the “impressionism” of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.

In its political allegory, this story of the ship's voyage from Bombay to Victoria Docks in London is markedly right-wing.