The Secret Agent Analysis

London: the total center of civilization, where the bright lights of reason and progress are always shining, right? Well not according to Conrad. Throughout this book, London is a very dark and wet...

This third-person narrator constantly weaves in and out of different character's minds, giving you a god's eye view. Even when the narrator doesn't give you all the pertinent details about a charac...

The Modernist element of this book is the way that Conrad messes with time. In the first stages of the book, we learn that Verloc needs to initiate an attack on the Greenwich Observatory. Suddenly...

Conrad would be an awesome snarky best friend and a terrible enemy. Just check out this bone-dry witty passage from Chapter 10:The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from the neighb...

Conrad's writing can be very difficult to follow, since he has a tendency to start a sentence going in one direction, to change direction, then change back to his initial direction before the sente...

The original title for this book was Verloc, and over the course of 1906, it changed to The Agent. By the time he published the novel, Conrad had come up with The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. The t...

To H.G. Wells: The chronicler of Mr Lewisham's love/ the biographer of Kipps and the historian of the ages to come/ this simple tale of the nineteenth century/ is affectionately offeredWhere to beg...

"And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and...

You can definitely understand what Conrad's saying in this book, but every now and then, you might have to read a sentence two or three times to figure it out. This is probably why even in Conrad's...

We learn about the Verloc household: Mr. Verloc financially supports his wife Winnie, along with her mother and brother Stevie, who is mentally disabled. Verloc has a double life: he runs a pornog...

Mr. Verloc runs a pornography shop, which is a front for his activities as a secret agent. He loves his job, since its not hard like other types of labor. Basically, he's paid very good money to...

Verloc gets his mission from Mr. Vladimir—bomb the Greenwich Observatory—and then spends the next chapter stressing about what he's going to do. After listening to his anarchist "friends" wax...

Follow this link for a great article on the incident in 1894 that inspired Conrad to write The Secret Agent.  (Source.) While Ted Kaczynski, also know as the "Unabomber," was killing people wi...

Unless you're talking about the smoking hole in the ground left by Stevie's bomb, there's not all that much steam in this book. This might be surprising, considering that Verloc owns and operates a...

Cesare Lombroso (3.23, 12.186)The Greenwich Bomb Outrage (throughout the book)Pop Culture References"The Blue Bells of Scotland" (4.125)