“Only two ways to die under the sun: the fat way and the thin way”

“Only two ways to die under the sun: the fat way and the thin way” is the narrator’s stark summary of life in the colonies: the climate leaves room for different bodily fates, but no escape from its power. Its darkly neat opposition turns the colonial promise of fortune and employment into a prognosis of deterioration, with the body—not ambition—deciding how a person is consumed.

The Expression in Context

The saying follows the narrator’s account of young French clerks recruited by the Compagnie Pordurière to work at the docks in Fort-Gono. They rush to unload freighters because harbor fees are costly, belaboring black porters while treating the company’s expenses as their own concern. The narrator describes them as conscientious yet heartless, devoted to their employers and willing to offer their youth and lives for twenty-two francs a day, less deductions. Their apparent energy and loyalty therefore carry an irony: they have come to serve the company, but the tropical environment also claims them.

A Bodily Binary

The expression distinguishes two outcomes—fattening and emaciation—without presenting either as a meaningful victory. The colonies make clerks fat or thin, and in both cases hold them fast; a person may prefer one fate, but constitution decides whether the bones press against the skin. The phrase’s simple parallel structure gives this process the force of a rule. It makes bodily change seem less like a choice than a sentence imposed by climate.

The Director as an Example

The narrator immediately applies the same logic to the Director, who lives on a red cliff beneath a tin roof exposed to the sun. Although he appears to be resisting the climate, the narrator says he is actually crumbling faster than the others. The Director hopes to make a fortune in two years through a scheme, but twenty-two predecessors had already tried their own ways of getting rich, while stockholders in Paris watched his efforts. His thinness and ambition do not exempt him from the fate expressed in the saying; the colonial hierarchy changes who profits, not who escapes bodily decline.

Significance

The expression’s force lies in how it reduces the grand language of colonial employment and advancement to two physical trajectories ending in death. Its dry, categorical tone echoes the narrator’s broader portrait of a system that extracts labor while exposing workers and managers alike to tropical illness and bodily deterioration. The Director’s fate sharpens the point: even those who command the enterprise and dream of wealth remain subject to the climate, while the workers’ devotion and the company’s calculations offer no protection from it.