Essay: Analyse the symbolic meaning(s) of the cross in Conrad's short story

In the story „An Outpost of Progress“ two new agents, Kayerts, the chief, and Carlier, his assistant, were sent to a lonely outpost in Africa to run an useless trading station.

Some distances away from the station is a tall cross, under which the former chief of the station is buried.(“In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this;…”p.10, l.17f)

This grave foreshadows the fatal ruin of the two white men and of the Company’s try to civilise the wilderness.

The first chief had been an unsuccessful painter and also Kayerts and Carlier came to the station because of personal failure in the past: Kayerts left his post in the Administration of the Telegraphs to earn a dowry for his daughter Melie, who was brought up by her aunts because her mother had died.

Carlier left the army and was forced by his brother-in-law to take the job with the trading company.

At the beginning of the story Kayerts and Carlier both work at the station but soon it becomes clear that they are unprepared and lazy. They are, in opposition to Makola, incompetent to run the station, the two whites can’t life out of an organized and civilised society. They just can’t stand on their own feet. (“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only possible through the high organization of civilized crowds.”p.12, l.16ff)

The two agents don’t realize Makola’s plan to sell the ten station men and afterwards they don’t judge him, they just take the tusk which was swapped for the ten stationmen, who Kayerts and Carlier were responsible for.

Therefore Gobila’s people don’t bring food to Kayerts and Carlier anymore, the two white men are short of provisions and that’s why their health deteriorates and they fail physically.

In the end they mistrust one another and the second chief Kayerts shoots Carlier. Afterwards Kayerts commits suicide on the first chief’s grave. His tongue, which sticks out at the Director is a clear symbol that civilization, the two agent’s mission, failed.

Laura S.