My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

Conrad’s line comes from his 1897 preface to *The Nigger of the “Narcissus”*, written as he was consolidating his reputation as a serious novelist and reflecting publicly on the aims of fiction. In this manifesto-like preface, he argues against merely didactic or propagandistic art and instead defines the novelist’s vocation as rendering experience with sensory immediacy and moral intensity. The statement encapsulates Conrad’s modernist-leaning emphasis on impression, atmosphere, and the evocation of lived reality—an approach shaped by his seafaring life, his multilingual background, and his desire to make English prose convey the vividness of direct perception.

Conrad defines literature as an act of perceptual transmission: the writer’s “task” is not simply to tell a story but to recreate experience so powerfully that readers seem to hear and feel it, and—most importantly—see it. “See” signals more than visual description; it implies insight, recognition, and a clarified apprehension of reality. The sequence (hear → feel → see) suggests an intensifying immersion that culminates in understanding. The quote also implies an ethical aesthetic: by making readers vividly perceive another world, fiction can enlarge sympathy and sharpen judgment without overt preaching.

1) “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”
2) “My task … is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see.”