The essential link between Joseph Conrad's novels Heart of Darkness and Nostromo is that they share the theme of Europeans entering a Third World nation in order to "save" the nation and its people in some way, but merely end up spreading their inevitably corrupting influences. Nostromo is far more complex (and much longer) work than Heart of Darkness, and uses a more intricate chronology, but the soul of the stories are the same in their portrayals of the spread of Western influences in Africa and Latin America. This is not to say that Conrad has an idealized understanding of the lives and societies in the Third World nations he fictionally examines. To the contrary, those societies are full of strife, violence, and their own brands of non-western corruption. However, what the white man brings is far worse, far more violent and corrupting, despite the fact that he seems to believe that he will be "saving" the black man or the brown man from himself and his "backward" culture. If there is a message to the two works, it is that the people of Africa and Latin America deserved to be left alone to work out their own destinies, whatever they might be, rather than to have the values and culture of the European imposed upon them.
Conrad does not show the Europeans to be wholly evil any more than he shows the Contaguanans to be wholly good. When Charles Gould comes to Costaguana to reopen the silver mine, it is clear that he has high hopes not only for the economy of the place, but also for himself and his partner. If he were asked, however, if he thought it were possible that he was bringing the calamity that would ensue, he would certainly have denied that any such thing were possible. The lines of Linda to Giorgio, after the killing of "the thief of his honour," ably stand as the message of the book, with respect to the motivations of outsiders who would come to build up and in their wake leave only destruction:
She could not bear...