Nostromo Themes

Political struggles are front and center in Nostromo: A Tale of The Seaboard; all the other themes somehow come back to or relate to this big ol' topic. Political life in Costaguana is incredibly c...

Money is king in Sulaco. Well, technically, Charles Gould is the one known as "El Rey [king] de Sulaco"—but he gets that title because he is crazy wealthy, so we think the principle stands. Money...

In this Nostromo: A Tale of The Seaboard, there are a ton of different types of foreigners running around. First, you have the foreign laborers like Nostromo, the men of the railway and dudes like...

Religion never really takes center stage in the Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, but it's always hanging out there in the background. There are three primary forms of religion in the novel: Cathol...

We could spend a lot of time debating where true power lies in Costaguana's universe. At first, it seems like wealth is the key to getting anything you want done in that country… but then, on sec...

If you've read Heart of Darkness (or the essay Chinua Achebe wrote about it), you know that Conrad is pretty interested in talking about race… and it gets him into some sticky places. Like Heart...

Patriotism seems to be a confused and confusing business in Costaguana. Main characters such as Charles, Antonia, and Martin are native to Costaguana and claim to feel like "Costaguaneros"… howev...

It seems that if you sneeze in Costaguana, you end up in a war with someone. Okay, okay, we exaggerate… but not by much. A lot of conflicts went down before Nostromo: A Tale of The Seaport even s...

Joseph Conrad frequently associates primitivism with certain groups (see "Race" and "Foreignness" for more on that), but it's just a big topic generally. When you first see someone or something des...