SOURCE: Lutz, John. “Centaurs and Other Savages: Patriarchy, Hunger, and Fetishism in ‘Falk.’” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 32, no. 3 (fall 2000): 177-93.

In the following essay, Lutz contends that “Falk” illustrates Conrad's belief that under the competitive, ruthless capitalistic system, bourgeois class conventions are illusions and will inevitably break down into anarchy and savagery.

—He was a born monopolist.¹

Taking note of the thematic connection that Conrad draws between a culture's habits of cooking and eating and their moral/psychological condition, Tony Tanner suggests that the basic symbolic opposition in “Falk” consists of a contrast between the civilization, order and sanity represented by the bourgeois existence aboard the Diana and the savagery, disorder and irrationality signified by Falk's cannibalism on the Borgmester Dahl. Viewing the confrontation between the stable Hermann and the nomadic Falk as “the core situation [and] central paradigm”² of the tale, Tanner notes the...