"Outpost of Progress" suggests comparisons with Heart of Darkness, Conrad's masterpiece of shorter fiction about the deterioration of a European in the tropics. Both stories are set in Africa and deal with the ivory trade, and the similarity between Kayerts in "Outpost of Progress" and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is hard to overlook. In point of fact, "Outpost of Progress" is often treated as an early sketch of the material that produced Heart of Darkness. The chief differences between the short story and Heart of Darkness are the absence of the perspective of Marlow as a narrator and the rather desultory and predictable nature of the Europeans' descent into boredom and self-destruction.

However, "Outpost of Progress" also is related in theme to such earlier Conrad works as "The Lagoon" (1898), and to Conrad's first two novels; Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands (1896). All of...