The Nigger of the "Narcissus"
1897 novel by Joseph Conrad
The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Forecastle (sometimes subtitled A Tale of the Sea) is an 1897 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad. The central character is an Afro-Caribbean man who is ill at sea while aboard the trading ship Narcissus heading towards London. Due to the offensiveness of the word nigger in the title, it was renamed The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle for the 1897 US edition. The novella dignifies the men in the forecastle and "explores voices at the margin of society".
Some critics have described the novella as marking the start of Conrad's major or middle period; others have placed it as the best work of his early period. In a letter, Conrad classifies the novella to be “the story by which, as creative artist, I stand or fall, and which, at any rate, no one else could have written. A landmark in literature, I can safely say, for nothing like it has been ever done before”.
Preface
Conrad's preface to the novel, regarded as a manifesto of literary impressionism, is considered one of his most significant pieces of nonfiction writing. It begins with the line: "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line".
Plot
The title character, James Wait, is a dying West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus, on which he finds passage from Bombay to London.
“The Nigger of the "Narcissus"” enters the record as 1897 novel by Joseph Conrad. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nigger, Narcissus and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Nigger of the "Narcissus"” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Nigger, Narcissus and novel provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q478537. VIAF identifies the subject as 184634075. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Nigger of the "Narcissus"” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.