Who is Joseph Conrad's winner in Victory?

Given the title, it’s impossible not to expect somebody to come out on top in the novel. But it’s very hard to make out any character who triumphs

It’s possible to make too much of a novel’s title. After all, writers often juggle wildly different alternatives for the same work: War and Peace could have been All’s Well That Ends Well; The Great Gatsby could have been The High-Bouncing Lover or Among the Ash Heaps.

Related: How reading Joseph Conrad has changed with the times

I really would urge people to finish the book before watching any critic dissect it. Most of them go straight to the final scenes, and an awful lot of the power of that ending depends on not knowing what happens - and how.

Heyst seems to me to be an existential hero in the mould of Camus’ Meursault from L’Etranger, but with a critical difference. Heyst’s existential soul is not self-imposed like Meursault’s. Instead he, like Hamlet, is meeting a duty to his father which in reality runs against his nature. It is this stark dichotomy in Heyst’s soul that Lena is attempting to defeat.

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