The central character is an Afro-Caribbean man who is ill at sea while aboard the trading ship Narcissus heading towards London.

[8] The title character, James Wait, is a dying West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus, on which he finds passage from Bombay to London.

Wait eventually confesses to a lazy Cockney sailor named Donkin that he is not as sick as he first claimed: that he is feigning illness to avoid having to participate in the laborious work required of every healthy seaman.

The ship continues to drift without a breeze and some of the crew, including Singleton, begin to whisper that Wait himself is responsible and that only his death will bring favourable winds.

This occurs within sight of land, as Singleton had predicted, and a strong wind returns immediately after Wait's body is committed to the sea.

The work, written in 1896 and partly based on Conrad's experiences of a voyage from Bombay to Dunkirk, began as a short story but developed into a novella of some 53,000 words.

Conrad appears to suggest that humanitarian sympathies are, at their core, feelings of self-interest[5] and that a heightened sensitivity to suffering can be detrimental to the management of human society.