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One of the problems of The Secret Agent, as of Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, is the extent to which Conrad succeeds in fusing into an organic whole a great number of apparently detached scenes and characters. Obviously the domestic tragedy of the Verlocs is the core of the plot, in terms of which many of the other characters can be accounted for: Mr. Vladimir precipitates the bombing, Karl Yundt's ravings excite Stevie's heated imagination, the Professor supplies the explosives, Chief Inspector Heat breaks the news of the boy's death to Winnie, and Comrade Ossipon arrives in time to complete the debacle by betraying Winnie's trust a second time. But there are other characters who are extraneous in these terms: Winnie's mother, Michaelis, the Assistant Commissioner, his wife's friend (the society hostess), and Sir Ethelred. And even those who fit into the plot machinery are developed at much greater length than such a simple function demands. Nor are they really indispensable to the plot; given their existence, they are justifiable, but Conrad could easily have done without them in the first place. Conrad himself was fully aware of these difficulties, and they came to a climax for him near the end of his career when he tried to transpose the novel into a play. Despite the advice of friends, he refused to telescope the seemingly superfluous and detached scenes into the more conventional unity of the standard wellmade play. For he was not trying to present only a single, straightforward situation, but was aiming at something requiring a wider, multiple focus. He was trying, in short, to render the moral atmosphere surrounding not one or two individuals, but an entire community of which the Verlocs, though symptomatic of the whole, form but a part. This purpose had been with his fiction from the beginning. The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon had shown community life at sea, and Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Heart of Darkness had shown it in the East and Africa. But in all of these
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