Stevie as Revolutionary in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Critics almost universally considered Stevie in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent as an unwitting victim of the Greenwich explosion. But we argue that because Conrad provides so little access to Stevie's mind there is much ambiguity concerning his role that has previously gone unremarked. Stevie may be an unwitting victim, but there are also a number of suggestions that he knows what he is doing when he places the bomb. Stevie, unlike the nominal revolutionaries in the novel, is the one character who actually performs a revolutionary act. In this contrast between possible unwitting victim / possible witting actor and witting nonactor, Conrad considers the question of who is a revolutionary.