An Outpost Of Progress

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1897

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Character Analysis

Themes

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Themes

The Hypocrisy of Western Colonialism

In many ways, “An Outpost of Progress” can be approached as a period piece, which is a story whose incendiary thematic argument would both appeal to and anger those of his own era. For most of the 19th century, white Europeans’ goal of civilizing the backwards countries of both Africa and Asia had created a concept of competing global empires in which these same white Europeans casually redrew the maps of these continents in their attempt to lay claim to these countries and colonize them primarily to develop their lucrative resources for much-needed raw foods and minerals. In the process, the argument followed, these same people would be blessed with the introduction of Western ways—its religion, arts, political structures, even languages. By contemporary standards that seek to respect diversity and explore the complicated dimensions of other cultures, the story reveals how gloriously ironic the entire enterprise became, collapsing of its own irony.

Here the two representatives of Western civilization are incompetent, lazy, and poorly trained. They are caricatures—each defined by their exaggerated physical size, one tall and thin, the other short and overweight. They hardly bring the locals a revitalizing sense of civilization or culture. The outpost is a business, ruthless and mercenary. The two Belgians treat the locals as slaves, and the central event of the story—the transaction in which the outpost scores its greatest haul of ivory—involves these same Europeans trafficking in the locals, trading tusks for locals. Clearly, the nearly century-long efforts to create and sustain a Western-style influence has not worked and, for all the high-sounding rhetoric the two Belgians spout as they arrive at the post (Kayerts confesses that when he first heard of the appointment he was moved to tears in anticipation of the awesome responsibility and glorious burden of representing civilization), they reveal in their smirking and condescending attitude toward the locals and their “uncouth babbling noise” (Part 1, Paragraph 9) the haughty arrogance and deep disdain the story argues had long compelled and sustained the entire colonial era.

The Moral Degeneracy of Human Nature

This is a story in which a character descends into the darkness of madness, a journey that, more than a century after Conrad published the story, is still only imperfectly understood. Why does Kayerts have a mental health issue? When Kayerts arrives at the outpost, he is brimming with confidence, versed in the rhetoric of imperialism, determined to redeem the entire Congo, and guided by his awareness of how much his daughter needs him to succeed. Is that not heroic, idealistic? Is he not humanity at its finest? Or is humanity at its dark heart the braying, murdering Kayerts at the end, literally howling at the moon after killing an unarmed friend before heading out to the river to clumsily hang himself? Which is humanity?

Ultimately, determining a reliable moral code in the jungle wilderness is an ironic enterprise. “The vast and dark country” that surrounds the outpost, its impenetrable curtain of dark green “rendered even more strange by the vigorous life it contained” (Part 1, Paragraph 5) provides the appropriate backdrop to the Belgians’ quick spiral into moral degeneracy. Within weeks, the forbidding tropical environment, so remote from anything the Belgians can reference, releases Kayerts and Carlier equally from the masquerade of culture and civilization. Their initial attempts to maintain such cultural sense—their discussions of the tattered books they find in the hut, their attempts to organize the hut’s layout, their chats about life back in Belgium—drift off into irrelevancy.

Without the artificial construct of the society they left far behind, both men revert to what the story sees as humanity’s animal nature, uncomplicated by morality and motivated only by greed, selfishness, anger, and ego. “Society […] had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine […] They could only live on condition of being machines” (Part 1, Paragraph 7). Left on their own, both men reveal the artificiality of the Western code of Christian behavior with its exemplum virtues of compassion, empathy, honesty, and kindness. The two are like “lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what to make of their freedom” (Part 1, Paragraph 8). Now far from that artificial social construct, away from the sustained performance piece that each individual plays at home, at work, in church, in museums and theaters, humanity would descend into crude animal violence and, ultimately, madness.

Existential Loneliness

The narrator addresses existential loneliness by offering a most forbidding assessment of the human condition:

A man may destroy everything within himself, love, and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear, subtle, dark, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath (Part 2, Paragraph 36).

Addressed to a Victorian society fairly happy with how it had turned out and confident that, given its foundations in Christianity and its faith in economic solvency, life was good and the future bright. That sense of oneness shatters as the weeks pass in the jungle and both Kayerts and Carlier surrender such phony optimism and begin to glimpse what the novel suggests most terrifies Western humanity: at its core is an existential emptiness, a bleak nothingness that cannot be filled with the happy rhetoric of Christianity or the accumulation of objects.

We are each alone, the story argues, in a world more complicated than we suspect. Stay in Belgium, the narrator suggests in all but words. Stay safe within your illusions. In the closing scene in which Kayerts murders his only friend for no other reason than his friend wants a spoonful of rationed sugar, he cannot connect with his own heinous act. He feels as if someone or something else actually pulled the trigger. This feeling is emphasized by the fact that the act itself is not described in the narrative; only the sound of the gun and the result of that sound are seen. Thus, the story suggests the existential dilemma that would, a generation after Conrad, shape the darkly comic concept of absurdism, how lurking all about vulnerable humanity is the terrifying implications of our own pointlessness, how the only thing more absurd than doing nothing is doing something. Kayerts begins the story pumped with the high-sounding rhetoric of heroic purpose and meaningful enterprise, but he ends hanging from a noose, his tongue sticking out, mocking those still left to live within the absurd and meaningless world he has glimpsed.