Transformations: Silence, Space, Absence

This chapter chronicles the transformative journeys Conrad’s characters make through their contact with the non-West. Such journeys have as their primary or secondary catalyst the encounter of Western characters with the non-West. These encounters end with the barriers between Western and non-Western space being blurred or disappearing altogether, and, in the process of their journeys, the characters come to reassess their world, their former presuppositions, their biases, and sometimes their conception of the very nature of their being and of the universe.