Cannibal Imagery
When Karl Yundt raves about the terrible injustices that some humans commit against others, he uses the image of eating and cooking flesh to describe it. Humans, he claims, are cannibals, constantl...
Obesity
Conrad was many things: brilliant, eloquent, well-traveled. He was also fat-phobic.In the figures of Verloc, Michaelis, and Sir Ethelred, Conrad indulges his weird and recurring desire to talk abou...
The Perfect Detonator
When Ossipon gets fed up with the Professor's bragging, he asks the Professor what he wants from the world, since all the man does is criticize both political radicals and the people in power. The...
The Multitude
Whenever the Professor seems to be really confident in how awesome he is, he has a way of going out onto the street and finding it "peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude" (5.2). The Pr...
Animals
When Stevie sees a cabman whipping a horse, he freaks out so badly that it almost seems as if the man is whipping him. In this way, animals play an important part in this book because they represen...
The Greenwich Observatory
As Mr. Vladimir explains, it won't do for Verloc to arrange an attack on a head of state, church, or parliament building, because all of these attacks could be explained as acts of angry violence u...
The Player Piano
It doesn't figure all that prominently into the story, but the player piano in the corner of the Silenus Restaurant adds another note of randomness and absurdity (even comedy) to Conrad's dark univ...