Blog #7

After finishing The Secret Agent, I am able to look back and analyze how and when my reading changed. Although this was a challenging book in the beginning, the plot slowly picked up speed and many things began to happen very quickly. The chapter when Chief Inspector Heat has a conversation with Winnie, and Winnie finds out that her own husband played a role in Stevie's death, is in my opinion the best chapter in the book. Not only does Winnie, a character who is thought to be innocent and minor, becomes a cold-blooded murderer of Verloc. This was a major plot twist that I did not expect, and its irony allowed this chapter and the book as a whole to become extremely powerful. Winnie murders a murderer, revealing a major theme throughout the novel. I did not expect Winnie to become such an authoritative and influential character because of her lack of action throughout the early part of the book. From this point on, the action and suspense keeps building. She runs into Ossipon and convinces him to run away with her with the money she received from Verloc. As we find out, he only pretends to agree until she boards the train and he jumps off last minute with her money. In addition, Winnie’s suicide just adds chaos to the whole situation.

This chapter is not only a major plot twist, but it is the most important one in which Conrad reveals themes about the book and his view of society in the early twentieth century. As if plotting to bomb the Greenwich Observatory wasn’t enough of a statement about society, Conrad develops a plot in which there is lack of trust, loyalty, and morality. Although this theme is dispersed throughout this book in small parts, Conrad is able to convey this theme in one climactic chapter. Violence and death become prominent motifs in the book as well, and they become very important when they transform characters like Winnie and Ossipon into corrupt citizens, making these characters dynamic.



It is because of this chapter that I not only was able to connect everything together, but it drastically changed my opinion of the novel. I was not a fan of this particular book in the beginning, but once I understood what Conrad was doing with the plot, I greatly enjoyed finishing the novel. The book was very blasé until this chapter, then it suddenly catapulted into this very meaningful and forceful book. The fact that Conrad has the ability to do this and change a reader’s opinion of the book as a whole a single chapter makes him a very competent author.