"The Return" is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1898 in the collection Tales of Unrest by T. Fisher Unwin.
Tall, good-looking and accomplished in business, Hervey is representative of his social class: conventional, self-complacent, and "eminently proper".
Instantly alarmed and deeply offended by this odd breach of decorum, he reads that letter to find that she has left the literary associate: "She's gone ... And—with that ... ass," Hervey is not heartbroken, but his humiliation sickens him physically.
[3] He described his struggle to confident Edward Sanderson:[4] I've been ten weeks trying to write a story of about twenty pages of print.
I can't!Even as "The Return" was collected in Tales of Unrest (1898), Conrad remarked: "My innermost feeling, now, is that it is a left-handed work.
"[5] Literary critic Laurence Graver reports that Conrad's opinion of the story improved when publisher Edward Garnett decided to collect the work in its entirety rather than serializing it.
[8][9] Literary critic Laurence Graver, in Conrad's Short Fiction (1969), wrote:[10] Weakened by lifeless dialogue, an unconvincing setting, and tiresome characters, it is an extravagantly self-indulgent story, a work that would have been perhaps bearable only at one-third its length.Baines reports that "the story tends in places to ponderousness and prolixity, but it is packed with remarkably sharp insight and ironical wit.
They are both able to have a revelation, but it is impossible for them to share it.The thematic center, according to Said, resides in the chronicling of a man's failure to grasp the significance of his wife's confused attempt to confront her husband with the emptiness and absurdity of their lives.
Said comments on the Sartreian crisis facing the protagonist:[20] Harvey is plunged into a realm in which "inexcusable truth" and "valid pretense" are confused.