7/7/2023 0 Comments Nostromo conradFirst: Costaguana has been conquered by Europeans for some time. This first chunk of text gives us a lot of really important information. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco-the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity-had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. In addition to giving us a ghost story that serves as a metaphor for some of the characters' behavior (see " Symbols"), this chapter provides a crystal clear picture of the topography of Sulaco's surroundings. Understanding the geography of Sulaco and the surrounding areas is pretty important, which is probably why Conrad starts the book with an entire chapter devoted to setting-no characters, no action. Most of the action takes place in Sulaco, a port town (which is also totally made up). Costaguana is a fictional South American country loosely based on Colombia.
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