Conradās influence on later novelists was profound, both because of his masterly technical innovations and because of the vision of humanity expressed through them. He is the novelist of humans in extreme situations.
Feminist and postcolonialist readings of Modernist works have focused on Conrad and have confirmed his centrality to Modernism and to the general understanding of it. Such readings have also criticized Conrad for reinforcing the imperialist and colonialist attitudes that his works condemned, particularly through his portrayal of African society in Heart of Darkness, a portrayal that some have deemed racist.
āThose who read me,ā Conrad wrote in his preface to A Personal Record, āknow my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.ā For Conrad, fidelity is the barrier humans erect against nothingness, against corruption, against the evil that is all about them, insidious, waiting to engulf them, and that in some sense is within each of us unacknowledged. But what happens when fidelity is submerged, the barrier broken down, and the evil without is acknowledged by the evil within? At his greatest, that is Conradās theme.