1.
Carol Reed, 1906 - 1976 (pronouns: he, him, his)
2.
Charles Dickens queered me on Carol Reed. Reed directed a movie musical Oliver! based on the novel by Charles Dickens Oliver Twist. The picture was released in 1968 to great acclaim. Reed was awarded the Oscar for Best Director. (Yes, the title of Reed’s movie has an exclamation point.)
One of the first serious novels that I read was Dicken’s Oliver Twist. I think I read the novel when I was about 10. My brother, a year younger than me, read the novel after I had finished it and we discussed the book in great detail.
I recall that the book involved grim descriptions of child abuse and violence. It was a serious novel in which bad things happened to good people. Bill Sikes beats the prostitute, Nancy, to death. A mob pursues Fagin. Sikes dies when swinging from a rope that loops around his neck and strangles him. I thought that the musical Oliver! was a travesty of the book and despised it. As a result, I dismissed Carol Reed as an uninteresting hack-director, a man with neither intelligence, nor taste.
3.
Carol Reed made three movies that are universally acclaimed. Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949). Outcast of the Islands, based on Joseph Conrad’s second novel of the same name, was released 1952. At the time of its first screening, Outcast of the Islands was dismissed by most critics and, later, said to mark a turning point in Reed’s directorial career. From that film, it was said to be all downhill.
But I’m not sure. And beginning in the mid-seventies, the film was revived and re-evaluated by no less formidable critics than David Thomson and Pauline Kael, both of whom declared that the picture was far better than its reputation.
Reed was the son of a famous late Victorian (and Edwardian) actor and theater manager, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. He was one of six illegitimate children that Tree fathered on his mistress Beatrice May Pinney. His parents were both striking figures and Reed was the epitome of debonair stylishness. Very handsome himself, he acted in theater for a few years and, then, migrated into directing both for the stage and movies. Reed was exceptionally well-educated and a quick study and he did his apprentice work with a number of Britain’s best directors of the pre-war period, particularly Thorold Dickinson (who made a startling version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades after the War). After directing some “quota quickies”, low budget films made to meet government quotas imposed to combat Hollywood influence in the UK, Reed was granted the opportunity to work on some prestige films, and, by all accounts, distinguished himself. The World War intervened and Reed worked in the military psychiatric department, producing several documentaries in support of the war effort. After the war, he made the three films on which his current fame rests one after another, producing a picture a year.
Odd Man Out (1947) was shot largely on location in West Belfast. The picture involves an IRA gunman who is wounded in a gun-battle with the police. The gunman, Johnny McQueen, flees through the night-time streets of Belfast, pursued by a tightening dragnet. James Mason played Johnny and the film was both critically acclaimed and a box-office hit. (The movie has many admirers: Roman Polanski claimed the picture inspired him to become a film-maker; figures as disparate as Gore Vidal and Sam Peckinpah have proclaimed that the movie is perfectly made.) Reed’s next movie was the most popular British film released in 1948, The Fallen Idol. The movie boasts a script by Graham Greene adapting one of his short stories. A young boy comes to suspect that the family’s butler, whom he idealizes, has committed a murder. Critics say that the picture is one of the best movies ever made about a child. The Fallen Idol features Ralph Richardson and Jack Hawkins.
In the United States, Reed is best known for The Third Man, a film released in 1949 and famously starring Orson Welles as the sinister Harry Lime. Shot on location in the post-war ruins of Vienna, the film is noteworthy for its hellish sewer sequences and Lime’s famous speech delivered on the Ferris Wheel at the Prater Amusement Park, a soliloquy in which the villain extols war and chaos as being essential to human creativity. Joseph Cotton is also featured in the movie produced by David O. Selznick. Once upon a time, the movie’s soundtrack, featuring a skittery zither theme, was iconic. It’s generally agreed that The Third Man is the best film noir ever made by a British director.
Outcast of the Islands is an ambitious production filmed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and at Shepperton Studios. Alexander Korda produce the movie. Released in 1951, the movie has the best cast that Reed was ever able to assemble: Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, Robert Morley, and Wendy Hillier. Highly acclaimed when it was released, the picture went into eclipse for many years, argued to be the film on which Reed’s career foundered. After this picture, it was alleged that Reed’s work was all down-hill although he made a number of other movies, some of them well-regarded: Trapeze (1956) was produced Burt Lancaster’s production company and starred the actor; it’s a circus picture. A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) is another small-scale but delicately made movie about children – it’s set in London’s Jewish community. Working again with Graham Greene, Reed directed Our Man in Havana, a good thriller released in 1959. Reed was hired to direct the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty but couldn’t tolerate Marlon Brando’s antics on the set and was fired from the production (Lewis Milestone finished the picture). Reed’s brilliant depiction of Sambir, the Borneo village where the action is set, and the sailing scenes in Outcast of the Islands seem to have recommended the director to the producers of the big-budget Mutiny on the Bounty – but Brando’s dissolute obstructionist approach to the movie was intolerable to Reed, who was, after all, a knight of the realm. After that Reed directed the big-budget picture The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), a huge self-important production with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison – the movie flopped. Reed ended his career with the movie musical Oliver! featuring his nephew Oliver Reed in the roll of Bill Sykes. The movie won lots of awards but it’s largely inert.
Only two British film-directors were knighted: Sir Alexander Korda and Sir Carol Reed.
4.
Outcast of the Islands adapts to the screen Joseph Conrad’s novel of similar name. Conrad’s book, An Outcast of the Islands, was published in 1896, fifty-five years before it was made into a movie. It is interesting to consider that this would be equivalent today to producing a movie based on a book written in 1968. I was alive in 1968 and recall events in that year. I suppose the same could be said as to 1896 for many people who might have seen this picture in 1952 when it was released. (Books published in 1968 were Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Darkness, Updike’s Couples, and William Gass’ short story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.)
An Outcast of the Islands is Conrad’s second novel. It is also the second book in Conrad’s series now called “The Lindgard Trilogy”. These three books all involve a character named Captain Tom Lindgard, renowned as an exemplary British sea captain. (This figure is based on William Lindgard who lived from 1829 to 1888 – the real Lindgard explored many of the islands and waters in Malaysia and was one of the first sea captains to exploit the Berau River as access to the interior of Borneo, an important plot element in Outcast of the Islands. He was known as “the King of the Sea.”) The first book in the Lindgard trilogy is Almayer’s Folly, also Conrad’s first novel, published 1895. This book was successful and was followed by a prequel, An Outcast of the Islands, the story of an Eastern River in which the story takes place twelve to fifteen years before the events narrated in Almayer’s Folly. Twenty-four years later, Conrad completed the trilogy with a prequel to the prequel, The Rescue published in 1920. The Rescue is a sort of origin story and depicts Captain Lindgard as a young man. Almayer’s Folly's depicts Lindgard as an old man.
Almayer’s Folly, until the last thirty years considered an apprentice work by Conrad, is about the Dutch trader, Kasper Almayer who has spent many years of his life searching in vain for gold mines said to be hidden in Borneo’s interior. (At that time, there were still headhunters in the jungles of Borneo.) Almayer’s “folly” is his obsessive love for his beautiful daughter Nina. (In more prosaic terms, his “folly” is his grandiose house in the rain forest.) Almayer dreams of his daughter becoming a great lady in Europe, but is thwarted when she falls in love with a Balinese prince. Nina is “half-caste”, that is, half Dutch and half Malayan. Her Malayan mother, Almayer’s wife despises her European husband and conspires with her daughter to defeat Almayer’s objective to install Nina as a Dutch socialite. When he learns that Nina has eloped into the forest with the native prince, Almayer burns down his pretentious home and becomes an opium addict.
Almayer’s Folly is over-written, poorly paced, and turgid with passages of purple prose. It is also surprisingly modern in that it features two women empowered to defeat the male protagonist who represents the imperialist order – Almayer’s wife acts on motives of revenge; Nina acts on the basis of her love for the native ruler. Perhaps, it is not so curious that Chantel Akerman, the Belgian feminist film-maker, made a notable version of Almayer’s Folly released in 2011 – I thought it odd that Akerman would choose to adapt Conrad for this elaborate, and expensive, period piece, but, on seeing the film, I recognize many of the director’s signature themes in the picture. (There is a Malaysian film version of the novel as well.)
A year later, Conrad published An Outcast of the Islands, also deemed to be one of the writer’s lesser works and, in some ways, a sketch for his much more acclaimed novella “The Heart of Darkness.” (Both books involve a European protagonist seduced and destroyed by a native woman.)
An Outcast of the Islands also involves Almayer, his Malay wife, and Nina. The book, like Almayer’s Folly, is set in Sambir. Sambir stands in for a real place Tanjung Redeb on the Berau River in Borneo. As with Almayer’s Folly, the book has been recently re-evaluated on the basis of its heroine, Aissa, a character whom post-colonialist critics interpret as a proto-feminist who has agency and acts to destroy the hapless and corrupt Willem, allegorized in these readings as a symbol for imperialist exploitation. As previously noted, Almayer, Nina, and his wife are a decade or more younger than the characters in Almayer’s Folly. To some degree, Outcast of the Islands depicts the events that led to Almayer’s loss of his trading station, a misadventure that drove him to his hopeless search of gold in the island’s interior.
The Rescue, A Romance of the Shallows published in 1920 shows the young Tom Lingard in love. The book is a “sea story” set in the Malay archipelago and replete with flotillas of canoes, native rebellions, pirates, and the like. It was highly regarded when first reviewed but, then, mostly forgotten for many years. Now, with a revival of interest in the politics of empire (and sexual politics), the book has won many new readers. If all three books are read together, as a single work, the trilogy is said to be a penetrating study of the nature and sensibility of the colonialist enterprise.
Conrad is an essential writer with respect to his depictions of imperialism. Chinua Achebe’s scathing essay on the racism implicit in “The Heart of Darkness” has cast some of Conrad’s works into disrepute. However, as is often the case, efforts are being made to rehabilitate the writer and restore his reputation, Most recently, those efforts have focused on the Lindgard Trilogy.
5.
In some ways, Reed’s version of Conrad’s novel is better crafted and more tightly constructed than the book. Reed eliminate some unpleasant racial elements by avoiding Conrad’s theme of miscegenation. (See notes below). He eliminates Conrad’s melodramatic and risible climax and ends the tale where Conrad should have cut his losses and ended as well. The confrontation between Lingard and Willems is the emotional core of the book and it would have been well for Conrad to not have engineered the melodramatic finale. (By contrast, Conrad’s last chapter, an epilogue of sorts, is very well done and moving – but its valedictory and would be difficult to visualize in film.) Complications in the novel’s plot involving the status of Omar, Aissa, and their people involve lots of dialogue between the villagers and the pirate clan embedded in their midst (Omar’s elderly brigands); this chatter which is written in formal, quasi-Biblical diction is irritating and hard to follow.
Movies have to show and not tell. Conrad’s prose is intended to occlude understanding in some respects – his focus is psychological and his primary interest is how people with bad motives persuade themselves that they are not acting badly but, even, somehow virtuously when committing their crimes. This is Conrad’s essential criticism of imperialism; the English masters, who are really just thieves, have developed elaborate and hypocritical theories, most untethered to reality, to justify their crimes. This theme is particularly apparent in “The Heart of Darkness”, the one text by Conrad that everyone knows – ultimately, Conrad’s books about the colonies involve elaborate inner monologues which are actually obfuscation; they conceal the true and venal wellsprings of action under an ornate veneer of overcharged and melodramatic rhetoric. Conrad’s reader is often left in the dark, motivations for actions hidden under layers of self-justificatory rhetoric. It is not surprising that Henry James was a great admirer of Conrad’s prose fiction. When I read An Outcast of the Islands, I found that I generally didn’t know exactly what was going on – Conrad’s prose is dense, sticky, suffocating. There’s no firm ground; in the confrontation scene with Lingard, the monsoon rains drown everything and Willems feels himself literally sinking into the swamp. By contrast, Reed’s characters are clearly delineated and their actions made both distinct and visible. When the monsoon rains pour down at the climax, Lingard and Willems confront one another among great stone ridges and domes. The ground doesn’t sink away as it does in Conrad’s description of the encounter. In general, Reed substitutes rock for Conrad’s swampy terrain. The best example of this is the unconvincing, if fairy-tale, montage showing the sailing ship navigating among massive and formidable rock formations. Reed imagines the difficulties of reaching the river and Borneo’s interior, the secret sea passage, in terms of giant cliffs and submerged reefs with black serrated edges. Conrad’s account of these difficulties is very different: the real Berau river, flowing down from Borneo’s highlands, fissions into a hundred channels in a swampy delta. Only one of those channels is deep enough to be successfully navigated by a trading ship. In Conrad, the hazard to the vessel is not that it will be run aground on savage-looking rocks, but that it will founder in swamps and sandbars in bath-warm tropical waters too shallow for navigation.
6.
It is often said that if Reed had died after making The Third Man or after completing Outcast of the Islands, he would be regarded as one of film history’s greatest directors. As it was, Reed continued making movies with ever diminishing success until the final travesty of Oliver! for which he was reliably, according to Hollywood custom, awarded an Oscar. Old directors are given Oscars of this kind as reward for going away. Reed didn’t exactly go away – he made two more pictures which are said to be execrable.
On the basis of this melancholy history, Reed’s reputation is that he got lucky in the second half of the forties when he was able to collaborate with other first-rate talents – Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man, the all-star cast in Outcast of the Island, Graham Greene as scenarist for The Fallen Idol and so on. (I think the astonishing Odd Man Out, a truly visionary film, gives the lie to this theory – Reed gets a superb performance out of James Mason, but he is the only star in the movie; the rest of the company are all Irish character actors recruited from Dublin’s Abbey Theater; Graham Greene noodled around on the script for Odd Man Out based on a 1945 novel by another, forgotten writer, but, in the end, couldn’t make the material cohere and the script is credited to another man, like the novelist of the source also now forgotten.) The truth is that Carol Reed’s name is on these films and they are his work; I have recently watched several of them and all are stylistically and thematically related.
The production of Outcast of the Island in London and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was apparently vexed. Freddy Francis (D.P for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man among other notable pictures) was a camera operator on the film. He described the shoot as miserable and said that Carol Reed was ovewhelmingly “dour” and completely humorless. That said, Outcast of the Islands is efficiently made, fast paced, and brilliantly shot in a discordant combination of styles that includes documentary footage of Sambir village and its inhabitants and spectacular chiaroscuro that seems derived from Murnau’s South Seas’ romance Tabu and some of Joseph von Sternberg’s more exotic sequences in his cycle of films featuring Marlene Dietrich such as The Devil is a Woman and The Scarlet Empress. The movie is carefully constructed with parallel characters. Who is the titular “outcast”? Obviously, Willems, but, of course, Aissa’s love for Willems renders her an outcast at the end of the movie and the little boy in the dug-out who stalks Willems in the village sequences is also an “outcast”, a “canoe boy” said to belong to no one. Reed deploys different editing styles as well – he uses Soviet-era montage for the sailing scenes among the rocks and, then, deploys a system of cuts that emphasizes characters gazing at one another: Mrs. Almayer (Wendy Hillier) stares at Willems, Willems stares at Aissa, the children and the canoe boy survey Willems and taunt them, Robert Morley is constantly observing Willems for evidence of perfidy. The two characters outside of this editing pattern of people watching other people are Aissa and Lingard. (Omar, Aissa’s pirate father is also an exception to this editing scheme; he is totally blind.) The manly Lingard gazes straight into the eyes of those that he encounters. Aissa, by contrast, never looks at anyone directly – she always stares out of the corners of her eyes, simultaneously showing deference, but, also, a kind of cunning – she is either a predatory animal or prey. (The exception is the frightening scene in which Aissa seizes Mrs. Almayer during the riot at the trading post and threatens to strangle her – in this scene, she gazes triumphantly out at the camera, looking straight ahead for one of the only times that we see her gaze outward in his movie.) The village is very much an organism and character in the film; the elaborate system of bamboo walkways forms a web around the houses on their stilts and the place is teeming with people who are shown constantly scrutinizing the Europeans. Almayer is disengaged from the place, always wearing his planter’s white suit and tie and he never approaches the squalid, crowded village. By contrast, Willems spends most of his time prowling the village and the shadowy water under the platforms of its houses. Like the canoe boy, he paddles around sulking, and, always, alone in his own canoe. Further, despite Francis’ claim about Reed’s humorlessness, there are several particularly funny scenes in the movie, most notably the parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado that we see in the opening when the clerk sent to summon Willems from the billiard hall goes out into the bright sunlight spinning his parasol jauntily as he hurries across the plaza.
When first released, Outcast of the Islands was acclaimed. It was nominated as Best Picture in Great Britain’s BAFTA awards. Bosley Crowther praised the move as being vividly realistic, engaging, but ultimately thematically vapid – it is nothing more than “a spectacle of dry rot,” he asserted. Later, Pauline Kael said that the movie was “uneven” but that the movie’s great “gesture toward life” was the villainy shown by Trevor Howard’s character, Willems – the character was unreservedly evil but “vividly alive.”
Outcast of the Islands is a psychological study in betrayal. The film is not a critique of the colonialist enterprise – the characters in the film are cosmopolitan traders and all thieves to some extent. Lingard has a monopoly on the river and Sambir’s commerce until Willems is persuaded to betray his secret passage into the interior to the fez-wearing Arab. (The movie is overdetermined with respect to this plot point – Willems ostensibly acts on the basis of his obsession with Aissa; Conrad says that Willems will only be allowed to associate with Aissa if Omar approves this liaison and his approval is withheld until the Arabs are given access to the river. But we see Willems carefully noting the seaway’s location on a chart of the archipelago as he is sailing to Sambir with Lingard, long before he ever cast eyes on Aissa. Therefore, it seems pretty evident that Willems, whose modus operandi is treachery, is positioned to betray Lingard before being tempted by Aissa.) Lingard’s monopoly isn’t based on any cognizable claim of virtue but results from the sea captain’s cunning – there’s no particular reason to prefer him to the Arab traders and the film shows him as vengeful and self-interested. When his yoke is cast off, the villagers enthusiastically revolt against his trading operation – although the riot seems to be based on the innate viciousness of the villagers and not any particular claim of oppression; no doubt the Arabs will be equally extortionate and unfair in their dealings with these people who are, more or less, pirates themselves. Virtuous characters are scarce in the movie – Aissa embodies Oriental savagery; her father is a vicious old sea wolf; Almayer seems to be a fool who mercilessly bullies the shiftless Willems; his wife’s distaste for Willem’s affair with Aissa seems based on her desire for the disreputable con man. Even Nina, Almayer’s little girl, surely one of the homeliest of all child actors, is nasty and cruel. This is a film without a hero and, more or less, without any overriding principles. In this regard, Outcast of the Islands is an adult picture of the kind rarely made any longer, Viewers have to make up their minds about who is in the right or, in fact, if anyone can even make that claim.
Reed v. Conrad
It’s instructive to compare the script of Outcast of the Islands (written by William Fairchild) to Conrad’s novel. Certainly, there are racist elements in both versions of the story. But it’s interesting to observe that, generally, the film shows more anxiety about race than the novel and is more offensive, I think, than the novel.
The first thing to observe is that in the book, Peter Willems has a wife named Joanna. Joanna is half Malaysian; her father is Willems employer, the Dutch trader, Hudig. (Willems relationship with Joanna is problematic; the book tells us that “she had rebelled (against the marriage) once – at the beginning. But only once.” Willems is explicitly described as a “wife-beater” who has thrashed Joanna into submission; no one seems to care much about this aspect of the caddish Willems’ conduct.) Willems has a child with Joanna and this boy figures in the climax in Conrad’s novel. Notice that Reed gives Willems an English wife – like Joanna, she despises Willems, but the character is a dead end and, once Willems leaves the harbor town, she vanishes from the picture. This is very unlike Conrad’s management of the book’s climax in which Joanna almost literally “shoots it out” with Aissa.
As with the American fur trade, the business model for trading enterprises in Malaysia seems to have been that the European businessmen made marriages with the daughters of local princes and chieftains. Conrad establishes this in the case of Almayer. In the novel, Almayer is married to a Malaysian woman and, therefore, Nina is “half-caste.” Reed won’t stand for this sort of miscegenation. He casts Wendy Hillier, the archetypal English rose, as Almayer’s wife. (And, further, Reed and his screenwriter put in a very effective and delicate subtext establishing the repressed desire felt by Almayer’s wife for the handsome, if brutal, Willem – this subtext strengthens the strong current of hatred that drives Almayer’s business relationship with Willem. There is nothing like this in Conrad and, in this respect, I think the film scenario improves on the novel.)
It seems clear that in the early fifties, Reed felt that he couldn’t show a English male cohabiting with a native woman, a state of affairs that Conrad takes for granted. Reed’s difficulties also arise from changing “Kasper” Almayer, a Dutchman, to Elmer Almayer, played by the quintessentially British, Robert Morley. Perhaps, Dutchmen might marry native women, but not an Englishman.
Furthermore, the feminist implications of Conrad’s novel are considerably weakened by Reed’s decision to render Aissa as silent, a native woman who doesn’t understand English (or Dutch) and can’t communicate with her lover, Willem. Indeed, at one point, Willem insults Aissa wondering aloud what she would think if she knew what he was saying. This is distinctly different from Conrad’s conception of the character. In the novel, Aissa is loquacious, seems to speak several languages, and acts politically, gambling that her liaison with Willem will enhance the standing of her people, a pirate tribe now living as supplicants to the local villagers at Sambir. Conrad doesn’t hesitate to show us Aissa’s deliberations and we understand what she is thinking. Reed portrays her like Kurtz’ African mistress as a sinister force of nature, an inarticulate embodiment of seductive lust and desire. (She’s always giving someone or other the ‘the side eye’ – that is looking with disgust at those around her.) In all respects, Aissa’s character has “agency” to use modern terms and is empowered by Conrad to act on her own behalf as well as on behalf of her blind father and her people. Indeed, she shoots Willems to death at the climax of Conrad’s novel, an episode that is not shown, or, even, suggested in the movie.
Lingard acts in a paternal role to both Joanna, Willems’ lawful wife, and Almayer’s wife, who was rescued as a child by the sea captain from pirates – we are given to understand that she is a Sulu woman, a survivor of a pirate raid repelled by Lingard in which the rest of the raiders were killed. (In the movie, since Wendy Hillier plays Almayer’s wife, Lindgard is openly acknowledged to be the woman’s father and Nina, who is not mixed race in the film, is the sea captain’s granddaughter.) Lingard exemplifies the specious paternalist aspects of colonialism –he is always acting for the supposed good of others, but with disastrous results. (When he saves some Chinese from pirates, the rescued people, who are also pirates, attack his ship and kill a number of his sailors; when he rescues a dog, the animal turns out to be rabid and runs amok biting several people.) Out of some kind of misguided charity, Lingard brings Willems’ spurned wife to Sambir along with her “ugly brat”, Lewis. At the end of the book, Joanna travels upriver in a canoe to confront Willems who is living in a shack with Aissa. Ever the doormat, Joanna pleads with Willems to take her back, apparently, willing to forgive his catastrophic dalliance with Aissa. Aissa, a much stronger and more independent character, has contempt for Joanna, whom she derisively calls a “Sirani”, that is, “Nazarene” or Christian. Conrad’s penultimate chapter in Outcast of the Islands is spectacular, or spectacularly “campy,” depending your outlook. Willems wants to return to Joanna because he believes there is a possibility that she can get him back to Singapore, regarded as civilization in the novel’s terms. But Aissa demands Willems’ allegiance. (Willems has tried to hide her behind a tree!) The two woman confront one another and it looks like a catfight is about to ensue. Then, Aissa solves the problem by taking Willems’ revolver and gunning him down. This is undisguised kitsch but pretty effective. For better or worse, Reed can’t touch this stuff – it’s radioactive in 1951, two women, one half-breed and the other native, fighting over a European man who has had sex with both of them.
There are other deviations from the novel, of course, most notably in the scene early in the book (and movie) in which Willems considers suicide. In the film, there’s no question that Willems feigns a suicide attempt to secure Captain Lingard’s sympathy. Conrad shows us Willems actually considering drowning himself (we’re privy to his despairing thoughts) before Lingard intervenes. In all respects, Conrad’s Willems is a weaker character, more prone to being influenced by sinister forces, for instance Aissa who is, herself, being manipulated by the cunning Babalatchi. In Reed’s conception, Willems is a villainous cad, an unrepentant narcissist who acts in his interest to damage others.
Conrad ends the book with a final chapter that serves as an epilogue. “Many years later”, Almayer is entertaining a “Roumanian naturalist”, exploring the jungle for orchids. (The Naturalist is a drunken swine.) In their colloquy, we learn that Lingard has returned upriver to place a stone monument over Willems inscribed: “Peter Willems, Delivered by the Mercy of God from his Enemy.” Aissa has gone mad, but, later, became a nursemaid and confidant to Nina. Almayer casually remarks that she was the “doubled-up crone” who served them their meal a few hours earlier. “They age quickly here,” he explains. Particularly, Almayer says, since Aissa often sleeps in the back country in a certain meadow by a stream – the reader understands that this is where she and Willems made love.
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