Old structures, new forms: The maturation of Joseph Conrad as a novelist through the application of a maritime hierarchy in his fiction

When Joseph Conrad wrote Youth, he established in it a triadic relationship between himself, the narrative person, and Marlow which continued to develop through the three later works: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Chance. Each of the three bodies of the dreifachganger rise progressively toward mastery, converging by the end of Lord Jim as a single voice. This ascension occurs on several separate, yet parallel planes of fiction and reality as the bodies of the dreifachganger become more fully established in a fictional realm, and their narrative becomes less autobiographical. By drawing the connection between the various planes of the dreifachganger's development, I have attempted to probe how Conrad's maturation as a writer was facilitated by, and progressed in conjunction with this dreifachganger. The dreifachganger, therefore, as developed in Conrad's fiction, becomes the tangible hierarchal structure that gauged and facilitated Conrad's own development as a novelist.