Said studied Conrad because he too reinvented himself through writing

Evidence

In 1966 Said published Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Conrad was an appropriate choice, for not only was he an exile, but he was a specialist in fictions set in exotic locales and his Heart of Darkness must be read as a dark parable about colonialism. Said used Conrad’s letters to study the ease with which Conrad presented his past life in order, as it were, to invent himself. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Self-invention through autobiography echoes how the narrator of Eighteen Seventy and other exile narratives construct identity through writing.