SOURCE: Kramer, Dale. “Conrad's Experiments with Language and Narrative in ‘The Return’.” Studies in Short Fiction 25, no. 1 (winter 1988): 1-11.

In the following essay, Kramer discusses Conrad's story “The Return” as a work of social satire.

In “The Return” Joseph Conrad attempted to portray a social context with which he was unfamiliar—that of the London middle-class professional—and to develop within that scene the universality of the themes he had handled, and was to handle in the future, with confidence and stylistic density in novels placed in the Malayan forests and on ships of the merchant marine. He develops these themes in a style of detachment and irony, giving sympathy to neither the man nor the wife of the story, who are alienated from each other but need each other not only as a public declaration of their conventionality but also as a possible source of the honest...