The Author's Note that Conrad wrote for Nostromo employs many of the same themes and techniques of the novel itself. On the surface it seems a fairly straightforward account of the origins of the story and some of its characters. But it is actually a layered, sophisticated document that plays with the notions of history and fiction until one isn't sure which is the origin of which.

The Author's Note is governed by the metaphor of the "journey" that Conrad took to Sulaco. On one level he is speaking of the nature of the creative impulse, which travels into and explores the terrain it is inventing (and which removes one from family life while it lasts). But there is another level at work, in which his journey, "with many intervals of renewed hesitation," is really into the depths of the novel's universal and profoundly bleak message. It is in this sense that he describes his youthful parting from the innocent, adamant patriotism of his homeland: "going away for good, going very far away--even as far as Sulaco." The "journey" then becomes even more complex when the Author's Note takes on a light-hearted conceit, in which the novel is a non-fictional history whose source is Don Jose Avellanos' book. This conceit involves us in the same questions of recursive narrative and material vs. immaterial reality that are central to the novel itself.

The dominant focus of the Author's Note, however, is on the character of Nostromo, whom Conrad proclaims the "central figure" of his novel. He belabors to such an extent the nature of Nostromo as "a man of the People" that I cannot avoid hearing an overriding purpose to this Author's Note, namely to bring to readers' attention the social allegory that they had heretofore missed.