An Outpost of Progress Analysis

An Outpost of Progress AnalysisJoseph Conrad whose original name was Jzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in Berdichev, Poland (currently Ukraine) on the 3 December, 1857 to a writer and a translator, Apollo Korzeniowski , who en couraged him to read widely in Polish and French. His mother Ewelina Korzeniowska, died of tuberculosis and soon aft(prenominal) his father, Apollo leaving him orphaned at the age of eleven. At the age of sixteen he abandoned Poland and for the next four long time he enlisted as a sailor in merchant ships, he also joined the British Merchant Navy and received British citizenship in 1886 changing his name to Joseph Conrad. He died in England on 3 August, 1924 of a heart attack.Joseph Conrad is considered one of the greatest novelists in the English literaty tale. His life, fill with adventures was the biggest divine guidance for the developing of his novels and stories, his political conspiracy works as an inspiration in his novel The Arrow of Gold and hi s travel to the coast of Venezuela gave him complete material to write Nostromo, considered by close to of his critics as a masterpiece. Conrad had the faculty to change the perception and the emotions of the reader, version his works is easy to feel desolation, fear, whodunit and many other things that he divvy upd to preserve in totally his works. He batch create a universe in which the main source must fighting to survive against the dark forces of nature or the sin part of human behavior. These characteristics can describe the literary work of Conrad oddly when he refers to the occidental civilization where he tries to show the obscurity of the colonized countries that existed in the mid nineteenth century, like in his novel The nerve centre of im moralisticity.Conrad travelled to the Congo Free State as an ambition of his shaverhood in 1889, filled with illusions and hopes, but instead of that he hand overed to Europe with an ablaze trauma of the atrocities t hat he witnessed there. These experiences served as inspiration to write Heart of Darkness and An Outpost of Progress.This essay is intended to show the criticism to the idea of continue in the short story An Outpost of Progress in which we can nonice the depression, the disappointment and pessimism that Conrad had towards the society in the nineteenth century. The story is virtually two ashen men, lazy and incompetents, Kayerts y Carlier who took over a vocation situation in Central Africa, their job is simple supervise the appealingness of ivory in the station. The director of the company, whom was aware of the uselessness of thoseLook at those two imbeciles. They must be mad at home to delight me such(prenominal) specimens. I told those fellows to plant a vegetable garden, build unused storehouses and fences, and construct a landing-stage. I bet nothing will be done They wont know how to begin. I always thought the station on this river useless, and they just fit the sta tionInstead of that the director rely in the will of Makola, a nigger from Sierra Leona who called himself Henry worth who ends up doing all the work. The two white men are otiose to do any job, even the simplest task like try to watch pop turn up the native language and communicate with the others in revisal to have more than people to trust in case of an emergency or look the surrounding areas. Instead of that they simply stay at the station, doing nothing, just reading the old books that the previous man in charge of the station had, and they reciprocation them to bring to those lands the civilization and progressTo grapple effectually with even stringently material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken carry on of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, a ll initiative, all expiry from routine and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines.Without creativity, without initiative, without intelligence and with a false set of value there cannot be progress, these two were just the opposite of this, they were a exhaust of a society that needed to get rid of them in order to progress. This type of people who are not capable to take care themselves without help from others.The days passed by until one day Makola made a trade, he trades the life of the Indians for a big piece of ivory. The lack of moral values and the effects of an African form of capitalism led the white men to a psychological process that ends up tragically. Gabola, the only hero of the white inepts, knowing the situation decided to not to take cerise measures, he decided to cut the supply of food, they only source that they had. They, sick, humiliated and demoralized, drinking a cup o coffee started to argue and started a riot because Kayerts denied to give to Carlier a little sugar to sweeten the coffee. That fight finished with the tragical death of Carlier. After the fight Kayerts in his loneliness start to think about what he had done and decided to run with himself, soon after the managing director arrives and the first thing he sees is the crucified torso of Kayerts.They are faulty machines of a society that accustomed their members to not to think, to not fend for themselves, they were taught by a superior to obey orders that they forget the most basic thing of being a human. They lack of human spirit until one of them in a fit of madness and illness decides to cut down the other in self defense and then find out that the other was unarmed. The new power of Kayerts started to rise, the new wave of thoughts rushing through his head may woke up a glimmer of intelligence in one way but more incompetent and coward that he already was in the other. But it was too late for him, he started to f eel fear, persuasion about heaven, the rules and the progress of real society was art to himProgress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered past, so that justice could be done.In An Outpost of Progress, Conrad refers with a little of mockery and irony to the idea of forward motion civilization and the progression through Christianity that is celebrated by the Queen capital of Seychelles and through Europe. For example Conrad uses one of the symbolic representations of Christianity, the cross and points out at the inauguration of the storyThere was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress.And when Kayerts trust suicide and the end of the storyHe had evidently climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and after tying the end of the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes were only a couple of inches above the ground his arms hung stiffly down he seemed to be standing(a) rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a egotistical tongue at his Managing Director.Conrads irony is clear, the crooked direction of the cross heart and soul that Christianity is useless and irrelevant in a place with different cultures and beliefs, in the hostile African jungle. Also the cross as a symbol of redemption and as a symbol of peace, the opportunity to reborn and consummate(a) life makes Kayerts in his impotence of a though of his own to founder suicide. For Conrad Christianity makes no sense of progress for other civilizations, this is because it is filled with violence, moral failures and sparing opportunism as we know the colonization movement in history of mankind, they were filled with bloodshed and unnecessary slaughter of innocent people. Also the political wave of that time with mixed points of view between the socialism and the capitalism as It sees when Makola traded the Indians for a piece of ivory, the material goods as a exchange of human lives. Maybe this is what Conrad saw when he arrived in Congo all his hopes in humankind were lost and that fake sound of progress unawares appeared when he returned to Europe, seeing the reality of the two faces of the coin, one nation in prosperity and the other paying the price.