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This essay reconsiders the familiar reading of Joseph Conrad as homo duplex, torn apart between his Polish past and English identity, by examining the construction of "the West" in Under Western Eyes. Born in Poland colonized by Russia and building his literary career in the British Empire, Conrad depicts Russia as a fundamentally oppressive and dangerous society. The English narrator fulfills his function by obsessively establishing and repeatedly confirming the distinction between "the West" and Russia. Conrad mobilizes the narrator's imperialistic assumptions in order to discursively contain and counterattack Russia from a supposedly "superior" Western perspective. At the same time, by stressing the incompatibility of "the West" and Russia in the same way as he defines Poland as a Western country in his essays, Conrad culturally associates Poland and England under the umbrella term of "the West." Gaining a new significance in the early twentieth-century, "the West," gave Conrad the language to map his two "homes" as one territory of civilization that was to be protected from Russian autocracy. Thus, Conrad's West embodies his double relation to imperialism, suggesting that British imperialistic assumptions and Polish anti-imperialistic nationalism could be intermingled in his mind.
