Identity and Individuation in ”A Smile of Fortune” by Joseph Conrad

Abstract

The paper sets out to analyse Conrad’s novella A Smile of Fortune and its narrator-protagonist’s crisis of identity in terms of the Jungian concept of individuation. The dynamic process of constructing the narrative identity, as defined by Ricoeur, finds its psychological equivalent in the concept of individuation which involves recognizing and assimilating the opposites that reside within the unconscious and aims at transforming the psyche into the Self or coincidentia oppositorum. The paper focuses on the narrator’s interaction with Jacobus and Alice as the stages of the individuation process which include a confrontation with the shadow and the anima, the archetypes of the unconscious.