ABSTRACT
Joseph Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress” (1897) is about two white men left in the expanse of colonized Africa who go crazy and die as a consequence of no longer having the ability to register themselves over and against their colonial peers or the Africans they deemed savage. White people “believe their words.”3
They believe their illusions of grandeur, and as Conrad’s story exposes, the tragedies of not believing in such illusions are seemingly as problematic for white people as are the consequences for others. The two white men were named Kayerts and Carlier. Kayerts was a short and
fat man, the chief in charge of the trading station owned by the Great Trading Company. Carlier was the assistant, tall and thin. They were dropped off at a trading post three hundred miles from the next nearest post, and the steam boat they arrived on would not return for six months. As Conrad writes of the two
men, “they were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds.”4
