57 pages • 1 hour read
Joseph ConradA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Kayerts enters the story as an overweight, mild-mannered but officious nobody, happy to be gifted with a thankless low-echelon job in an isolated outpost, an appointment for which he is eminently unqualified. Back in Belgium, he had served for a time as an administrator in the government telegraph offices, and as he tells the Director of the outpost company, he “knew how to express himself correctly” (Part 1, Paragraph 1). The logic is of course specious, like a librarian claiming that job ipso facto makes them a great writer. He is the most dangerous kind of fool: one completely unaware of how foolish he is.
This sort of pretense is at the core of Kayerts’s character. For him, the appointment at the outpost is his chance to represent Belgium, to be a sort of paragon of civilized manners and cultured living. Exposed to an unfamiliar world where his sense of civilization is deeply compromised, and where he must fall back on his own minimal resources to maintain focus within a vast and oppressive jungle wilderness, Kayerts summarily experiences mental health issues and gives into the feral nature his upbringing had convinced him was irrelevant to who he was.
By Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad
Nostromo
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
The Secret Sharer
The Secret Sharer
Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes
Under Western Eyes
Joseph Conrad
Victory
Victory
Joseph Conrad
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection
View Collection