Western Space in Non-Western Space

This chapter considers Western spaces that exist within non-Western space: the various trading stations and similar establishments that appear in so many of Conrad’s works. This chapter argues that these Western enclaves are established as havens of sound and activity in contrast to the silence and emptiness of the surrounding non-Western space. In the end, however, such spaces prove to be mere facades that either gradually lose any distinction that might have originally existed between such spaces and the surrounding non-Western space, or such distinctions have disappeared by the beginning the tale, or they have never existed in the first place. As a result, barriers break down between these enclaves of Western space and the non-Western space that surrounds them.