Fitting, then, that the ultimate chapter is drawn from Conrad's own experience in narrowly escaping a coastal interceptor early in his life, as described towards the end of his autobiographical work, The Mirror of the Sea.Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish: ( listen) 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. Peyrol seems to mimic Conrad himself in this regard.
Rather, it is about the impossibility of certain men ever belonging to anything other than the tempests that drag them into adventure, literal or imaginary. He awaits his final return to the sea, a place of no fixed boundaries, no sense of permanence, no true identity, just as Peyrol's life was at Escampobar, the farmhouse where he has sought refuge after his time as a corsair in the Indian Ocean. His life away from the sea, albeit stretching over years and years, long enough for his hair to turn white, is but a temporary lull.
Like many of Conrad's protagonists, Peyrol, the Rover of the title, is a liminal character. It's quite a subtle effect, and one that illuminates both characters and the trails of the plot in a multi-layered fashion. In form, it appears initially as a linear tale, but it is one that washes back in forth like a series of waves, gliding into transitions, taking up different perspectives, and only then returning to the origins of those points of view. As it was, The Rover was his last completed work before his death, with the unfinished Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel published posthumously. Its elegiac and melancholy tone would have made it a fitting work with which Conrad might have concluded his writing career. A straightforward adventure story, which, beneath the surface, explores the motivations and fears for having lived a life with meaning.
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