ABSTRACT
In a letter to his American literary agent, J. B. Pinker, Conrad put aside his characteristic self-lacerating tone and struck a rather positive note about the writing of Nostromo, then under way: It is a very genuine Conrad. Conrad’s portrayal of Nostromo’s major protagonists reveals his explicit preoccupation with the operation of political forces in society. In Nostromo Conrad reinvents the story of Lord Jim in the arena of socioeconomic historical forces. The major protagonists of Nostromo are driven to act by a romanticization of their roles in history. Conrad explores many ways in which human beings unthinkingly pursue autonomy from the forces of history which are at least partly those generated by matter; and the nineteenth-century myth of progress, in spite of our disillusionment, is of supreme importance in Nostromo. Thus, the ending of Nostromo is marked by a sense of bitter personal losses and failure, and the signs of history with its terrible contingencies prowl in the background.
