Many people have found Nostromo difficult to read. This is probably not because there is any particular difficulty in seeing the meaning of the writing itself, since there are very few passages where one has any idea that the writer was a foreigner who only began to learn English in his late teens. It probably means, rather, that Conrad changes our expectations of what kind of continuity we should expect in the writing; most obviously, we should look, not for the usual forward chronological development of the story and its characters from sentence to sentence, but instead for other patterns of meaning and other significant continuities that Conrad does establish.

The prose

Let us begin by looking at the prose style and, to start with, at the functions of one sentence in the first chapter.

That chapter in general is an ambitious, and very successful, description of the general scene of Nostromo - Sulaco, the Cordillera, the Golfo Placido, and its three uninhabited little islands called the Isabels. Of the middle island, Conrad writes:

The vocabulary is ordinary; educated, no doubt, but without any long or rare words. The syntax is equally ordinary - it is a simple sentence, with only the one finite verb - ‘rustles’. Admittedly there are a good many qualifiers - there is only one noun without an adjective, ‘spines’; and spines is itself a qualifier iir the adjectival phrase, ‘rough with spines’. Conrad keeps his relatively long - thirty-three-word - sentence grammatically simple by using two long phrases each qualifying ‘palm’; and one could object that the second phrase, ‘a very witch amongst palm trees’, is actually syntactically dependent not on the immediately preceding phrase about the ‘trunk’, but on the ‘old ragged palm’.