"His ideas were not in the nature of convictions. They were inaccessible to reasoning. They formed in all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips, and his candid blue eyes cast down because the sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in solitude" (79)
Michaelis, who spent fifteen years in prison for a bungled attempt to free three political prisoners, became so solipsistically idealistic during his incarceration that he is no longer able to truly discourse with other people; rather, he speaks with the same kind of lonely force that he would use to speak to himself in his cell. Conrad illustrates this attitude with a description of the man's features.
"And a peculiarly London sun—against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot—glorified all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance" (9)
Apart from the infamous London fog, itself a combination of English climate and late nineteenth-century English industry, the sun that shines ominously into the general miasma is likened in a vivid metaphor to an eye staring at everything in the city. This can be interpreted to represent the reader's eye.
"She did not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of the late Mr Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs Verloc breathed these two would have been perfect in accord: that accord of prudent reserve without superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which had been the foundation of their respectable home life" (193)
After Mrs. Verloc stabs Mr. Verloc, there is a seemingly interminable duration of time when the gravity and reality of the situation have not yet set in, when Mrs. Verloc becomes hyper-sensitive towards the details and atmosphere of the parlor room where she finds herself -- and her husband's corpse. The language of the narration, which takes Mrs. Verloc's point of view through free indirect perspective, does not name the fact of Mr. Verloc's being dead so clearly.
"After taking the boy away from under my very eyes to kill him—the loving, innocent, harmless lad. My own, I tell you. He was lying on the couch quite easy—after killing the boy—my boy. I would have gone on the streets to get out of his sight. And he says to me like this: ‘Come here,’ after telling me I had helped to kill the boy. You hear, Tom? He says like this: ‘Come here,’ after taking my very heart out of me along with the boy to smash in the dirt" (212)
Mrs. Verloc describes to Ossipon, with the same kind of visual vividness that Conrad is so fond of, the lead-up to her murder of her husband. Plain visual descriptions, such as that of Mr. Verloc lying on the couch, are immediately exploded through juxtaposition with such shocking facts as the awareness that it was Mr. Verloc who led Stevie to his death.
