Joseph Conrad “An Outpost of Progress”
1. Find a few examples of irony in the text and explain them in the context of the story.
2. How are the two white men described? What drove them to take the job in Africa?
3. The presence of the first dead chief of the station looms large over the story. How does he influence the events in the story even after he's dead?
4. Describe the relationship between Makola and the two white men.
5. Why is the store-room called “the fetish”?
6. What role do the old books and newspapers found at the station play in Kayerts' and Carlier's lives?
7. What's the relationship between Gobila and the white men?
8. Who are other workers at the station and what is their status?
9. The white men respond with indignation when they realize Makola bartered their African workers for tusks. Explain the irony of this moment in the story.
10. After bartering their African workers, the white men deteriorate physically and mentally. Explain the reasons for their degradation, both literal and metaphorical.
11. Conrad has been accused by contemporary critics of being racist despite his anti-colonialism. Can you find some arguments in the story either for or against this charge?
Comment upon these quotes:
“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.”
“Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought.”
“Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean--except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.”