More Than an Escape: The Hidden Power of the Narrative Storm

Conrad, Netflix, and the Necessity of Fiction

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, does not spend his time with trendy business manuals. When asked by CNBC about his leadership secrets, he didn’t point to a Steve Jobs biography or a Silicon Valley manifesto. Instead, he cited Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon, a slim 1902 novella about a sea captain battling a relentless storm. Sarandos admits he reads it “over and over,” discovering a new layer with every pass. Where he once saw a reckless madman in the captain, he now sees a leader navigating the sheer unpredictability of existence.

Interestingly, Sarandos is not alone among tech titans. Jeff Bezos has long championed Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as his favorite novel, finding within its pages profound truths about the heavy weight of decision-making. Bill Gates, while a more infrequent fiction reader, admits he seeks out complex characters to help him view the world through a different lens.

However, treating these masterpieces as mere business lessons would be like calling Moby Dick a manual for whalers. The true strength of literature begins exactly where utilitarian benefits end. Why we read fiction isn’t about finding a “hack” for success; it’s about finding a lighthouse in the dark.

A Laboratory of Reality

For millennia, fiction served as a navigational tool for individuals lost in the currents of history. When Homer’s Odysseus wandered the seas, his listeners found a framework for their own lives—a sign that even amidst the chaos of war, one could find the pattern of a heroic journey. The modern novel, which found its footing with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, took on a similar but more intimate task during the 19th century.

In a world of rapid industrialization and collapsing social hierarchies, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Bolesław Prus’s The Doll were not escapes from reality. They were intense laboratories of it.

Take Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. This isn’t just a story about the social climbing of Julien Sorel; it is a vivid portrait of post-Napoleonic France. More importantly, it is a vehicle that transports us into the mind of a young man torn by ambition, hypocrisy, and passion. Where a historian sees social shifts and a sociologist sees upward mobility, literature reveals how these forces paralyze the personality in moments of crisis. Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma remains a cutting-edge analysis of the internal mechanics of power and politics.

Why We Read Fiction: Decoding the Complexity of Life

Literary fiction provides a space where an individual’s “small history” confronts the “Great History” of the world. In this clash, we find deep understanding rather than simple answers. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace demonstrates how single individuals and entire societies shape history—and are shaped by it in return.

One can write about World War II like a historian—linearly, explaining processes and events. Or, one can approach it like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow or William T. Vollmann in Europe Central—through the prism of dreams, impressions, and the raw emotions of the protagonists. This is how we actually experience the world: not as a dry timeline, but as a sensory overload.

Language That Says More: From Proust to Video Games

This brings us to the challenge of language. Why is literature often so demanding? Why aren’t simple sentences and linear plots enough? Plain language is like clear glass—useful for looking at a specific object. Literary language, however, is like a crystal; it refracts light, revealing hidden colors and unexpected reflections.

When Marcel Proust spends dozens of pages on the taste of a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time, he isn’t performing a stylistic stunt. He is building a tool to capture the very mechanism of memory—its fragility and its weight. Similarly, James Joyce’s Ulysses might seem like incomprehensible babble to some, but it remains a masterful attempt to capture the entire rhythm of the mundane. It tracks the ordinary day of an ordinary man with obsessive precision, subtly parodying the heroism of ancient epics.

“Difficult” prose doesn’t want to be a simple messenger of information; it wants to be an experience in itself. It demands empathy and imagination from the reader. Just as a video game requires muscle memory and reflexes, why we read fiction is to engage in a simulation of another person’s way of thinking.

A Practice in Being Human

This engagement is priceless in our distracted age. Professor Brooke Vuckovic of Northwestern University suggests that literary fiction is an undervalued, effective, and deeply pleasurable tool for personal development—provided it is read with intention. The key lies in “close reading”—analyzing motivations and finding parallels between the book’s world and our own.

Ultimately, the power of Conrad’s Typhoon doesn’t lie in a risk management checklist. It lies in the encounter. Captain MacWhirr isn’t a “leadership archetype.” He is a specific human in an extreme situation, and the reader experiences his stubbornness, his fear, and his determination firsthand. These emotions carry the same weight on a merchant vessel as they do in a modern boardroom or a family crisis.

Great literature refuses to give easy answers. Instead, it holds up a mirror to our own experiences. In a world obsessed with efficiency and immediate utility, choosing to read a novel is an act of freedom. It is the choice of complexity over simplicity and empathy over calculation.

We don’t read to run away. We read to return to the world as richer, more attentive, and better-prepared human beings. Whether our personal “storm” takes place on the high seas or in a conference room filled with algorithms, the benefits of why we read fiction remain the same: it is a continuous exercise in what it means to be human.

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