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The author stresses the family romance fantasy of Joseph Conrad, pointing out that in his rescue fantasies, Conrad was strongly identified with the perennial rescuer, Henry Morton Stanley, and that throughout his multifaceted life, Conrad patterned his actions after famous men. Further, throughout his life one discerns the pendulum swinging between extremes of masculine action as opposed to the posture of sickness, inertia, and collapse which characterized his creative career as well, since bouts of mental and physical invalidism followed every major piece of fiction. His adventures in real life are genetically linked to the reveries and readings of his lonely childhood. According to Conrad himself, it was his voracious reading in childhood which tended to preserve his sanity in the face of these early vicissitudes. (His mother died when he was seven, and his father when he was eleven.)
In his transparently autobiographical fiction, Conrad's family romance fantasies are further expressed, and the theme of rescue achieves special prominence. Meyer comments on Conrad's denial of his longing for his fatherland, Poland, his unconscious ties to Catholicism, his guilt about having left his homeland, and the Oedipal struggle with his father who was both author, fanatical patriot, and advocate of Polish nationalism. Meyer also draws attention to Conrad's sexualization of his writing and stresses that the family romance should include the quest for the idealized mother as well as father figure.