An Outpost Of Progress

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1897

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Summary

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

The Jungle

The jungle wilderness all around the outpost symbolizes a beautiful, terrifying world of paradox and moral relativism where the traditional markers of Western civilization—right and wrong, good and bad—are as hopelessly entangled as the thick vines that Kayerts orders cut back only to find, just a week later, the growth has returned thicker and stronger.

The jungle, which surrounds and eventually closes in on both Belgians, is in a way less a place and more a character, not so much the antagonist as the character designed to teach, perhaps a difficult lesson but one that needs to be learned if not by the obtuse Belgians than by the reader. The longer the two men remain at the outpost, the more the wilderness presses down upon them and, in the process, renders most of the unexamined assumptions they have long maintained about civilization and culture as irrelevant. Put a person in a church, and they will seem religious. Put a person at a family dinner table, and they will seem domestic. Put a person in a classroom, and they will seem educated. Put them in a jungle, and they become, well, less human. The narrator sums it up: “Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety and reliability of their surroundings” (Part 1, Paragraph 5).

Put Kayerts and Carlier in the African jungle and they quickly drop the pretense of culture and civilization. The jungle symbolizes a contradictory world: at once beautiful and deadly, inviting and threatening, expansive and claustrophobic. Given their education in the Western concept of moral and ethical absolutes, neither man is prepared to adjust to a world defined the wild growth and efflorescence of vegetation that is beautiful but also provides cover for deadly predators, marauding raiders, and poisonous growths. The locals can casually negotiate that world of moral relativism because they are products of the jungle—Makola can coolly trade ivory for people and see that not as an expression of moral depravity but as a smart business move. The jungle teaches a difficult lesson—Carlier dies because he cannot grasp that his co-worker is now an imminent threat; Kayerts dies because he cannot embrace his own heart of darkness.

The Outpost

As a symbol, the outpost where Kayerts and Carlier are assigned works against itself in that it reveals a huge disparity between expectations and reality. This is supposed to be a fortress designed not just to maintain efficient trade routes but to glorify the European presence and to suggest the welcome aura of civilization. That the outpost, with its minimal appointments, its disarray, and its filth, reveals the inability to transplant culture and civilization gives the story its dramatic irony: the reader understands what the characters do not. This spare outpost testifies to the meagerness of Europe’s ambitious (and entirely misguided) attempt to bring civilization to Africa. For the first few weeks both Belgians tackle long overdue repair projects, but neither maintains focus, their drive withered by the jungle heat.

Perhaps the most telling thing about the outpost where Kayerts and Carlier serve is the article Conrad uses in the title: it is not THE outpost of progress but rather AN outpost of progress, suggesting there is in fact a string of these outposts, these oases of civilization, culture, and refinement. Indeed, when the company’s director drops off the two, he assures them he will return no earlier than six months because he will be visiting all the other outposts strung up along the Belgian Congo.

The outpost is just four buildings connected by dusty roads. There are the servants, as well as livestock, and the outpost also smells like waste. The building where Kayerts and Carlier live is a crude and tiny three-room construction. There are few furnishings, few comforts. Just days after the two arrive, the tiny house is cluttered with their things. The outpost, with its miserable appearance and its grand mission, is a masquerade, a pretense, a kind of Potemkin village. The outpost pretends to be a proud headquarters for progress, its administrators gifting the remote central African wilderness with civilization. Yet, there is a sense of hasty construction about the outpost, a feeling that it is something other than a permanent presence in the Congo wilderness. Thus, the outpost symbolizes the doomed futile attempt by white Europe to save the Africans, who do not need saving.

The Cross

Kayerts dies on the cross—he hangs himself on the bluff overlooking the river, suspended from the cross fashioned by the previous director of outpost operations. Within Christian culture, which both Belgians represent and of which they are de facto emissaries to the locals of the African Congo, dying on the Cross (and the word here requires the capitalization) is a gesture freighted with symbolic importance. In the sacrifice on the Cross, Christ defined the highest virtues of what would become Christian civilization in Europe: agape, sacrifice, nobility, heroism. To die on the Cross, then, elevates death itself and gives it a grace-resplendent aura. The Cross is not to be taken lightly. It embodies the drama of redemption central to the Christian faith. Indeed, Kayerts’s name is a play on the Greek name for Christ.

Here the symbol is used ironically. The previous director, a failed artist who took the posting because he was desperate, hungry, and without a home back in Belgium, died of fever, an inglorious kind of death, hardly the stuff of the grand epic narrative of the Cross. When he first arrives, this failed artist attempts to construct a simple Cross for his hut, but he even manages to mess up this simple task since the cross he makes is mismeasured and slightly perpendicular, the irregularity suggesting that his cross is hardly the Cross.

The suicide of Kayerts—he hangs himself from the perpendicular cross that marks the old director’s grave on the bluff overlooking the river—marks the story’s ironic deflation of the high seriousness of the Christian Cross. It then becomes an ironic deflation of the pretense and sense of moral superiority that both Belgians bring to their posting. In the story’s closing paragraph, Kayerts, destroyed by guilt over his killing of Carlier and with a mental health issue from the remoteness and isolation of the jungle, hangs himself clumsily from the bar of the graveyard cross. Appropriately, the bluff is enveloped in a hanging morning fog, suggesting confusion, lost perspective, and the lack of clarity. In a final ironic undercutting of the Christian mission to use the Cross of Christ to save the world, Kayerts, hanging from this misshapen cross, sticks a blackened, swollen tongue out at the world, mocking himself, his boss (who is just steaming into port), and, ultimately, the Church itself, which exists in a brutal, ugly world that will not abide the fetching fantasy of redemption.