Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

Context


J
oseph Conrad did not begin to
learn English until he was twenty-one years old. He
was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857,
in the Polish Ukraine. When Conrad was quite young, his father was
exiled to Siberia on suspicion of plotting against the Russian government.
After the death of the boy’s mother, Conrad’s father sent him to
his mother’s brother in Kraków to be educated, and Conrad never again
saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was seventeen
and spent the next twenty years as a sailor. He signed on to an English
ship in 1878, and eight years later he became
a British subject. In 1889, he began his
first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and began actively
searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to
the Congo. He took command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890,
and his experiences in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart
of Darkness. Conrad’s time in Africa wreaked havoc on his
health, however, and he returned to England to recover. He returned
to sea twice before finishing Almayer’s Folly in 1894 and
wrote several other books, including one about Marlow called Youth:
A Narrative before beginning Heart of Darkness in 1898.
He wrote most of his other major works—including Lord Jim, which
also features Marlow; Nostromo; and The
Secret Agent, as well as several collaborations with Ford
Madox Ford—during the following two decades. Conrad died in 1924.



Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in
particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals
of modernism. Like their Victorian predecessors, these novels rely
on traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant
attack in a changing world and in places far from England. Women
occupy traditional roles as arbiters of domesticity and morality,
yet they are almost never present in the narrative; instead, the
concepts of “home” and “civilization” exist merely as hypocritical
ideals, meaningless to men for whom survival is in constant doubt.
While the threats that Conrad’s characters face are concrete ones—illness,
violence, conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical character.
Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early
decades of the twentieth century, Heart of Darkness is
as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is
about imperialism.

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart
of Darkness. By the 1890s, most
of the world’s “dark places” had been placed at least nominally
under European control, and the major European powers were stretched
thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires.
Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and
the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened
the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were
clearly falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests
that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate
outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially
power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same
time, this begs the question of whether it is possible to call an
individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so
thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus,
at its most abstract level, is a narrative about the difficulty
of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of
one man to judge another.

Although Heart of Darkness was one of
the first literary texts to provide a critical view of European
imperial activities, it was initially read by critics as anything
but controversial. While the book was generally admired, it was
typically read either as a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer
who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities,
or else as a sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values: Kurtz’s
Intended, who appears at the novella’s conclusion, was roundly praised
by turn-of-the-century reviewers for her maturity and sentimental
appeal. Conrad’s decision to set the book in a Belgian colony and
to have Marlow work for a Belgian trading concern made it even easier
for British readers to avoid seeing themselves reflected in Heart
of Darkness. Although these early reactions seem ludicrous
to a modern reader, they reinforce the novella’s central themes
of hypocrisy and absurdity.

Plot Overview


H
eart of Darkness centers
around Marlow, an introspective sailor, and his journey up the Congo
River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities.
Marlow takes a job as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian
concern organized to trade in the Congo. As he travels to Africa
and then up the Congo, Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency
and brutality in the Company’s stations. The native inhabitants
of the region have been forced into the Company’s service, and they
suffer terribly from overwork and ill treatment at the hands of
the Company’s agents. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise
contrasts sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds
the white man’s settlements, making them appear to be tiny islands
amidst a vast darkness.



Marlow arrives at the Central Station, run by the general
manager, an unwholesome, conspiratorial character. He finds that
his steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for parts
to repair it. His interest in Kurtz grows during this period. The manager
and his favorite, the brickmaker, seem to fear Kurtz as a threat
to their position. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the delays in
repairing the ship all the more costly. Marlow eventually gets the parts
he needs to repair his ship, and he and the manager set out with a
few agents (whom Marlow calls pilgrims because of their strange habit
of carrying long, wooden staves wherever they go) and a crew of
cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up the river. The dense jungle and
the oppressive silence make everyone aboard a little jumpy, and the
occasional glimpse of a native village or the sound of drums works
the pilgrims into a frenzy.

Marlow and his crew come across a hut with stacked firewood, together
with a note saying that the wood is for them but that they should
approach cautiously. Shortly after the steamer has taken on the
firewood, it is surrounded by a dense fog. When the fog clears, the
ship is attacked by an unseen band of natives, who fire arrows from
the safety of the forest. The African helmsman is killed before Marlow
frightens the natives away with the ship’s steam whistle. Not long
after, Marlow and his companions arrive at Kurtz’s Inner Station,
expecting to find him dead, but a half-crazed Russian trader, who
meets them as they come ashore, assures them that everything is
fine and informs them that he is the one who left the wood. The
Russian claims that Kurtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected
to the same moral judgments as normal people. Apparently, Kurtz
has established himself as a god with the natives and has gone on
brutal raids in the surrounding territory in search of ivory. The
collection of severed heads adorning the fence posts around the
station attests to his “methods.” The pilgrims bring Kurtz out of
the station-house on a stretcher, and a large group of native warriors
pours out of the forest and surrounds them. Kurtz speaks to them,
and the natives disappear into the woods.

The manager brings Kurtz, who is quite ill, aboard the
steamer. A beautiful native woman, apparently Kurtz’s mistress,
appears on the shore and stares out at the ship. The Russian implies
that she is somehow involved with Kurtz and has caused trouble before through
her influence over him. The Russian reveals to Marlow, after swearing
him to secrecy, that Kurtz had ordered the attack on the steamer
to make them believe he was dead in order that they might turn back
and leave him to his plans. The Russian then leaves by canoe, fearing
the displeasure of the manager. Kurtz disappears in the night, and
Marlow goes out in search of him, finding him crawling on all fours
toward the native camp. Marlow stops him and convinces him to return
to the ship. They set off down the river the next morning, but Kurtz’s
health is failing fast.

Marlow listens to Kurtz talk while he pilots the ship,
and Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal documents, including
an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a scrawled
message that says, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The steamer breaks
down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz dies, uttering his
last words—“The horror! The horror!”—in the presence of the confused
Marlow. Marlow falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually
he returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s Intended (his fiancée).
She is still in mourning, even though it has been over a year since
Kurtz’s death, and she praises him as a paragon of virtue and achievement.
She asks what his last words were, but Marlow cannot bring himself
to shatter her illusions

Character List




Marlow -
The
protagonist of Heart of Darkness. Marlow is philosophical,
independent-minded, and generally skeptical of those around him.
He is also a master storyteller, eloquent and able to draw his listeners
into his tale. Although Marlow shares many of his fellow Europeans’
prejudices, he has seen enough of the world and has encountered
enough debased white men to make him skeptical of imperialism.
Read an
in-depth analysis of Marlow.









Kurtz -
The
chief of the Inner Station and the object of Marlow’s quest. Kurtz
is a man of many talents—we learn, among other things, that he is
a gifted musician and a fine painter—the chief of which are his
charisma and his ability to lead men. Kurtz is a man who understands
the power of words, and his writings are marked by an eloquence
that obscures their horrifying message. Although he remains an enigma
even to Marlow, Kurtz clearly exerts a powerful influence on the
people in his life. His downfall seems to be a result of his willingness
to ignore the hypocritical rules that govern European colonial conduct:
Kurtz has “kicked himself loose of the earth” by fraternizing excessively with
the natives and not keeping up appearances; in so doing, he has
become wildly successful but has also incurred the wrath of his
fellow white men.






General manager -
The chief agent of the Company in its African territory,
who runs the Central Station. He owes his success to a hardy constitution
that allows him to outlive all his competitors. He is average in
appearance and unremarkable in abilities, but he possesses a strange
capacity to produce uneasiness in those around him, keeping everyone
sufficiently unsettled for him to exert his control over them.



Brickmaker -
The
brickmaker, whom Marlow also meets at the Central Station, is a
favorite of the manager and seems to be a kind of corporate spy.
He never actually produces any bricks, as he is supposedly waiting
for some essential element that is never delivered. He is petty
and conniving and assumes that other people
are too.



Chief accountant -
An efficient worker with an incredible habit of dressing
up in spotless whites and keeping himself absolutely tidy despite
the squalor and heat of the Outer Station, where he lives and works.
He is one of the few colonials who seems to have accomplished anything:
he has trained a native woman to care for
his wardrobe.



Pilgrims -
The
bumbling, greedy agents of the Central Station. They carry long
wooden staves with them everywhere, reminding Marlow of traditional
religious travelers. They all want to be appointed to a station
so that they can trade for ivory and earn a commission, but none
of them actually takes any effective steps toward achieving this
goal. They are obsessed with keeping up a veneer of civilization
and proper conduct, and are motivated entirely by self-interest.
They hate the natives and treat them like animals, although in their greed
and ridiculousness they appear less than
human themselves.






Cannibals -
Natives
hired as the crew of the steamer, a surprisingly reasonable and
well-tempered bunch. Marlow respects their restraint and their calm
acceptance of adversity. The leader of the group, in particular,
seems to be intelligent and capable of ironic reflection upon
his situation.



Russian trader -
A
Russian sailor who has gone into the African interior as the trading
representative of a Dutch company. He is boyish in appearance and temperament,
and seems to exist wholly on the glamour of youth and the audacity
of adventurousness. His brightly patched clothes remind Marlow of
a harlequin. He is a devoted disciple of Kurtz’s.



Helmsman -
A
young man from the coast trained by Marlow’s predecessor to pilot
the steamer. He is a serviceable pilot, although Marlow never comes
to view him as much more than a mechanical part of the boat. He
is killed when the steamer is attacked by natives hiding on the
riverbanks.



Kurtz’s African mistress -
A fiercely beautiful woman loaded with jewelry who
appears on the shore when Marlow’s steamer arrives at and leaves
the Inner Station. She seems to exert an undue influence over both
Kurtz and the natives around the station, and the Russian trader points
her out as someone to fear. Like Kurtz, she is an enigma: she never
speaks to Marlow, and he never learns anything more about her.



Kurtz’s Intended -
Kurtz’s naïve and long-suffering fiancée, whom Marlow
goes to visit after Kurtz’s death. Her unshakable certainty about
Kurtz’s love for her reinforces Marlow’s belief that women live
in a dream world, well insulated from reality.



Aunt -
Marlow’s
doting relative, who secures him a position with the Company. She
believes firmly in imperialism as a charitable activity that brings
civilization and religion to suffering, simple savages. She, too,
is an example for Marlow of the naïveté and illusions of women.



The men aboard the Nellie -
Marlow’s friends, who are with him aboard a ship
on the Thames at the story’s opening. They are the audience for
the central story of Heart of Darkness, which Marlow
narrates. All have been sailors at one time or another, but all
now have important jobs ashore and have settled into middle-class,
middle-aged lives. They represent the kind of man Marlow would have
likely become had he not gone to Africa: well meaning and moral
but ignorant as to a large part of the world beyond England. The narrator
in particular seems to be shaken by Marlow’s story. He repeatedly
comments on its obscurity and Marlow’s own mysterious nature.



Fresleven -
Marlow’s
predecessor as captain of the steamer. Fresleven, by all accounts
a good-tempered, nonviolent man, was killed in a dispute over some
hens, apparently after striking a village chief.

Analysis of Major Characters





Marlow


Although Marlow appears in several of Conrad’s other works,
it is important not to view him as merely a surrogate for the author. Marlow
is a complicated man who anticipates the figures of high modernism
while also reflecting his Victorian predecessors. Marlow is in many
ways a traditional hero: tough, honest, an independent thinker,
a capable man. Yet he is also “broken” or “damaged,” like T. S.
Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock or William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson.
The world has defeated him in some fundamental way, and he is weary,
skeptical, and cynical. Marlow also mediates between the figure
of the intellectual and that of the “working tough.” While he is
clearly intelligent, eloquent, and a natural philosopher, he is
not saddled with the angst of centuries’ worth of Western thought.
At the same time, while he is highly skilled at what he does—he
repairs and then ably pilots his own ship—he is no mere manual laborer. Work,
for him, is a distraction, a concrete alternative to the posturing
and excuse-making of those around him.



Marlow can also be read as an intermediary between the
two extremes of Kurtz and the Company. He is moderate enough to allow
the reader to identify with him, yet open-minded enough to identify
at least partially with either extreme. Thus, he acts as a guide
for the reader. Marlow’s intermediary position can be seen in his
eventual illness and recovery. Unlike those who truly confront or at
least acknowledge Africa and the darkness within themselves, Marlow
does not die, but unlike the Company men, who focus only on money
and advancement, Marlow suffers horribly. He is thus “contaminated”
by his experiences and memories, and, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,
destined, as purgation or penance, to repeat his story to all who
will listen.





Kurtz


Kurtz, like Marlow, can be situated within a larger tradition.
Kurtz resembles the archetypal “evil genius”: the highly gifted
but ultimately degenerate individual whose fall is the stuff of
legend. Kurtz is related to figures like Faustus, Satan in Milton’s Paradise
Lost, Moby-Dick’s Ahab, and Wuthering Heights’s
Heathcliff. Like these characters, he is significant both for his
style and eloquence and for his grandiose, almost megalomaniacal
scheming. In a world of mundanely malicious men and “flabby devils,”
attracting enough attention to be worthy of damnation is indeed
something. Kurtz can be criticized in the same terms that Heart
of Darkness is sometimes criticized: style entirely overrules
substance, providing a justification for amorality and evil.

In fact, it can be argued that style does not just override
substance but actually masks the fact that Kurtz is utterly lacking
in substance. Marlow refers to Kurtz as “hollow” more than once.
This could be taken negatively, to mean that Kurtz is not worthy
of contemplation. However, it also points to Kurtz’s ability to
function as a “choice of nightmares” for Marlow: in his essential
emptiness, he becomes a cipher, a site upon which other things can
be projected. This emptiness should not be read as benign, however,
just as Kurtz’s eloquence should not be allowed to overshadow the
malice of his actions. Instead, Kurtz provides Marlow with a set
of paradoxes that Marlow can use to evaluate himself and the Company’s men.

Indeed, Kurtz is not so much a fully realized individual
as a series of images constructed by others for their own use. As
Marlow’s visits with Kurtz’s cousin, the Belgian journalist, and
Kurtz’s fiancée demonstrate, there seems to be no true Kurtz. To
his cousin, he was a great musician; to the journalist, a brilliant
politician and leader of men; to his fiancée, a great humanitarian
and genius. All of these contrast with Marlow’s version of the man,
and he is left doubting the validity of his memories. Yet Kurtz,
through his charisma and larger-than-life plans, remains with Marlow
and with the reader.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols



Themes


<blockquote class="quotation">Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.</blockquote>

The Hypocrisy of Imperialism


Heart of Darkness explores the issues
surrounding imperialism in complicated ways. As Marlow travels from
the Outer Station to the Central Station and finally up the river
to the Inner Station, he encounters scenes of torture, cruelty,
and near-slavery. At the very least, the incidental scenery of the
book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise. The impetus
behind Marlow’s adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent
in the rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The men who work for
the Company describe what they do as “trade,” and their treatment
of native Africans is part of a benevolent project of “civilization.”
Kurtz, on the other hand, is open about the fact that he does not
trade but rather takes ivory by force, and he describes his own
treatment of the natives with the words “suppression” and “extermination”:
he does not hide the fact that he rules through violence and intimidation.
His perverse honesty leads to his downfall, as his success threatens
to expose the evil practices behind European activity in Africa.



However, for Marlow as much as for Kurtz or for the Company, Africans
in this book are mostly objects: Marlow refers to his helmsman as
a piece of machinery, and Kurtz’s African mistress is at best a
piece of statuary. It can be argued that Heart of Darkness participates
in an oppression of nonwhites that is much more sinister and much
harder to remedy than the open abuses of Kurtz or the Company’s
men. Africans become for Marlow a mere backdrop, a human screen
against which he can play out his philosophical and existential
struggles. Their existence and their exoticism enable his self-contemplation.
This kind of dehumanization is harder to identify than colonial
violence or open racism. While Heart of Darkness offers
a powerful condemnation of the hypocritical operations of imperialism,
it also presents a set of issues surrounding race that is ultimately troubling.



Madness as a Result of Imperialism


Madness is closely linked to imperialism in this book.
Africa is responsible for mental disintegration as well as physical
illness. Madness has two primary functions. First, it serves as
an ironic device to engage the reader’s sympathies. Kurtz, Marlow
is told from the beginning, is mad. However, as Marlow, and the
reader, begin to form a more complete picture of Kurtz, it becomes
apparent that his madness is only relative, that in the context
of the Company insanity is difficult to define. Thus, both Marlow
and the reader begin to sympathize with Kurtz and view the Company
with suspicion. Madness also functions to establish the necessity
of social fictions. Although social mores and explanatory justifications
are shown throughout Heart of Darkness to be utterly
false and even leading to evil, they are nevertheless necessary
for both group harmony and individual security. Madness, in Heart
of Darkness, is the result of being removed from one’s
social context and allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s own actions.
Madness is thus linked not only to absolute power and a kind of
moral genius but to man’s fundamental fallibility: Kurtz has no
authority to whom he answers but himself, and this is more than
any one man can bear.



The Absurdity of Evil


This novella is, above all, an exploration of hypocrisy,
ambiguity, and moral confusion. It explodes the idea of the proverbial
choice between the lesser of two evils. As the idealistic Marlow
is forced to align himself with either the hypocritical and malicious
colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-defying Kurtz,
it becomes increasingly clear that to try to judge either alternative
is an act of folly: how can moral standards or social values be
relevant in judging evil? Is there such thing as insanity in a world
that has already gone insane? The number of ridiculous situations
Marlow witnesses act as reflections of the larger issue: at one
station, for instance, he sees a man trying to carry water in a
bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches
native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal
in mind. The absurd involves both insignificant silliness and life-or-death
issues, often simultaneously. That the serious and the mundane are
treated similarly suggests a profound moral confusion and a tremendous
hypocrisy: it is terrifying that Kurtz’s homicidal megalomania and
a leaky bucket provoke essentially the same reaction from Marlow.




Motifs


<blockquote class="quotation">Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.</blockquote>

Observation and Eavesdropping


Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the
world around him and by overhearing others’ conversations, as when
he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of
the Central Station and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader.
This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of direct communication
between individuals: information must come as the result of chance
observation and astute interpretation. Words themselves fail to
capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be taken in the context
of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlow’s conversation
with the brickmaker, during which Marlow is able to figure out a
good deal more than simply what the man has to say.



Interiors and Exteriors


Comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart
of Darkness. As the narrator states at the beginning of
the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces, in the surrounding
aura of a thing rather than in any hidden nugget of meaning deep
within the thing itself. This inverts the usual hierarchy of meaning:
normally one seeks the deep message or hidden truth. The priority
placed on observation demonstrates that penetrating to the interior
of an idea or a person is impossible in this world. Thus, Marlow
is confronted with a series of exteriors and surfaces—the river’s
banks, the forest walls around the station, Kurtz’s broad forehead—that
he must interpret. These exteriors are all the material he is given,
and they provide him with perhaps a more profound source of knowledge than
any falsely constructed interior “kernel.”



Darkness



Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of
the book’s title. However, it is difficult to discern exactly what
it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked
in darkness. Africa, England, and Brussels are all described as
gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Darkness
thus seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than
specifically. Darkness is the inability to see: this may sound simple,
but as a description of the human condition it has profound implications. Failing
to see another human being means failing to understand that individual
and failing to establish any sort of sympathetic communion with
him or her.




Symbols


<blockquote class="quotation">Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.</blockquote>

Fog


Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures
but distorts: it gives one just enough information to begin making
decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information,
which often ends up being wrong. Marlow’s steamer is caught in the
fog, meaning that he has no idea where he’s going and no idea whether
peril or open water lies ahead.



The “Whited Sepulchre”


The “whited sepulchre” is probably Brussels, where the
Company’s headquarters are located. A sepulchre implies death and
confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises
that bring death to white men and to their colonial subjects; it
is also governed by a set of reified social principles that both
enable cruelty, dehumanization, and evil and prohibit change. The
phrase “whited sepulchre” comes from the biblical Book of Matthew.
In the passage, Matthew describes “whited sepulchres” as something
beautiful on the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies
of the dead); thus, the image is appropriate for Brussels, given
the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about imperialism’s civilizing
mission. (Belgian colonies, particularly the Congo, were notorious
for the violence perpetuated against the natives.)



Women


Both Kurtz’s Intended and his African mistress function
as blank slates upon which the values and the wealth of their respective
societies can be displayed. Marlow frequently claims that women
are the keepers of naïve illusions; although this sounds condemnatory, such
a role is in fact crucial, as these naïve illusions are at the root
of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion.
In return, the women are the beneficiaries of much of the resulting
wealth, and they become objects upon which men can display their
own success and status.



The River


The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It
allows them access to the center of the continent without having
to physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man
to remain always separate or outside. Africa is thus reduced to
a series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlow’s steamer
as he travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel Europeans
from Africa altogether: its current makes travel upriver slow and
difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward
“civilization,” rapid and seemingly inevitable. Marlow’s struggles
with the river as he travels upstream toward Kurtz reflect his struggles
to understand the situation in which he has found himself. The ease
with which he journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors
his acquiescence

Part 1


<blockquote class="quotation">Beginning through Marlow’s being hired as a steamboat
captain.</blockquote>

Summary


At sundown, a pleasure ship called the Nellie lies
anchored at the mouth of the Thames, waiting for the tide to go
out. Five men relax on the deck of the ship: the Director of Companies,
who is also the captain and host, the Lawyer, the Accountant, Marlow,
and the unnamed Narrator. The five men, old friends held together
by “the bond of the sea,” are restless yet meditative, as if waiting
for something to happen. As darkness begins to fall, and the scene
becomes “less brilliant but more profound,” the men recall the great
men and ships that have set forth from the Thames on voyages of
trade and exploration, frequently never to return. Suddenly Marlow
remarks that this very spot was once “one of the dark places of
the earth.” He notes that when the Romans first came to England,
it was a great, savage wilderness to them. He imagines what it must
have been like for a young Roman captain or soldier to come to a
place so far from home and lacking in comforts.



This train of thought reminds Marlow of his sole experience
as a “fresh-water sailor,” when as a young man he captained a steamship going
up the Congo River. He recounts that he first got the idea when,
after returning from a six-year voyage through Asia, he came across
a map of Africa in a London shop window, which reinvigorated his
childhood fantasies about the “blank spaces” on the map.

Marlow recounts how he obtained a job with the Belgian
“Company” that trades on the Congo River (the Congo was then a Belgian territory)
through the influence of an aunt who had friends in the Company’s
administration. The Company was eager to send Marlow to Africa,
because one of the Company’s steamer captains had recently been
killed in a scuffle with the natives.



Analysis


Marlow’s story of a voyage up the Congo River that he
took as a young man is the main narrative of Heart of Darkness.
Marlow’s narrative is framed by another narrative, in which one
of the listeners to Marlow’s story explains the circumstances in
which Marlow tells it. The narrator who begins Heart of
Darkness is unnamed, as are the other three listeners,
who are identified only by their professional occupations. Moreover,
the narrator usually speaks in the first-person plural, describing
what all four of Marlow’s listeners think and feel. The unanimity
and anonymity of Marlow’s listeners combine to create the impression
that they represent conventional perspectives and values of the
British establishment.

For the narrator and his fellow travelers, the Thames
conjures up images of famous British explorers who have set out
from that river on glorious voyages. The narrator recounts the achievements
of these explorers in a celebratory tone, calling them “knight-errants” of
the sea, implying that such voyages served a sacred, higher purpose.
The narrator’s attitude is that these men promoted the glory of Great
Britain, expanded knowledge of the globe, and contributed to the
civilization and enlightenment of the rest of the planet.

At the time Heart of Darkness was written,
the British Empire was at its peak, and Britain controlled colonies
and dependencies all over the planet. The popular saying that “the
sun never sets on the British Empire” was literally true. The main
topic of Heart of Darkness is imperialism, a nation’s
policy of exerting influence over other areas through military,
political, and economic coercion. The narrator expresses the mainstream
belief that imperialism is a glorious and worthy enterprise. Indeed,
in Conrad’s time, “empire” was one of the central values of British
subjects, the fundamental term through which Britain defined its
identity and sense of purpose.


From the moment Marlow opens his mouth, he sets himself
apart from his fellow passengers by conjuring up a past in which
Britain was not the heart of civilization but the savage “end of
the world.” Likewise, the Thames was not the source of glorious
journeys outward but the ominous beginning of a journey inward,
into the heart of the wilderness. This is typical of Marlow as a
storyteller: he narrates in an ironic tone, giving the impression
that his audience’s assumptions are wrong, but not presenting a
clear alternative to those assumptions. Throughout his story, distinctions
such as inward and outward, civilized and savage, dark and light,
are called into question. But the irony of Marlow’s story is not
as pronounced as in a satire, and Marlow’s and Conrad’s attitudes
regarding imperialism are never entirely clear.

From the way Marlow tells his story, it is clear that
he is extremely critical of imperialism, but his reasons apparently
have less to do with what imperialism does to colonized peoples
than with what it does to Europeans. Marlow suggests, in the first
place, that participation in imperial enterprises degrades Europeans
by removing them from the “civilizing” context of European society, while
simultaneously tempting them into violent behavior because of the
hostility and lawlessness of the environment. Moreover, Marlow suggests
that the mission of “civilizing” and “enlightening” native peoples
is misguided, not because he believes that they have a viable civilization
and culture already, but because they are so savage that the project
is overwhelming and hopeless. Marlow expresses horror when he witnesses
the violent maltreatment of the natives, and he argues that a kinship
exists between black Africans and Europeans, but in the same breath
he states that this kinship is “ugly” and horrifying, and that the
kinship is extremely distant. Nevertheless, it is not a simple matter
to evaluate whether Marlow’s attitudes are conservative or progressive,
racist or “enlightened.”

In the first place, one would have to decide in relation
to whom Marlow was conservative or progressive.
Clearly, Marlow’s story is shaped by the audience to whom he tells
it. The anonymous narrator states that Marlow is unconventional
in his ideas, and his listeners’ derisive grunts and murmurs suggest
that they are less inclined to question colonialism or to view Africans
as human beings than he is. His criticisms of colonialism, both
implicit and explicit, are pitched to an audience that is far more
sympathetic toward the colonial enterprise than any twenty-first-century
reader could be. The framing narrative puts a certain amount of
distance between Marlow’s narrative and Conrad himself. This framework
suggests that the reader should regard Marlow ironically, but there
are few cues within the text to suggest an alternative to Marlow’s
point of view.

Part 1 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s visit to the Company Headquarters through
his parting with his aunt.</blockquote>

Summary


After he hears that he has gotten the job, Marlow travels
across the English Channel to a city that reminds him of a “whited
sepulchre” (probably Brussels) to sign his employment contract at
the Company’s office. First, however, he digresses to tell the story
of his predecessor with the Company, Fresleven. Much later, after
the events Marlow is about to recount, Marlow was sent to recover
Fresleven’s bones, which he found lying in the center of a deserted
African village. Despite his reputation as mild mannered, Fresleven
was killed in a scuffle over some hens: after striking the village
chief, he was stabbed by the chief’s son. He was left there to die,
and the superstitious natives immediately abandoned the village.
Marlow notes that he never did find out what became of the hens.



Arriving at the Company’s offices, Marlow finds two sinister women
there knitting black wool, one of whom admits him to a waiting room,
where he looks at a map of Africa color-coded by colonial powers.
A secretary takes him into the inner office for a cursory meeting
with the head of the Company. Marlow signs his contract, and the
secretary takes him off to be checked over by a doctor. The doctor
takes measurements of his skull, remarking that he unfortunately
doesn’t get to see those men who make it back from Africa. More
important, the doctor tells Marlow, “the changes take place inside.”
The doctor is interested in learning anything that may give Belgians
an advantage in colonial situations.

With all formalities completed, Marlow stops off to say
goodbye to his aunt, who expresses her hope that he will aid in
the civilization of savages during his service to the Company, “weaning
those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.” Well aware that
the Company operates for profit and not for the good of humanity,
and bothered by his aunt’s naïveté, Marlow takes his leave of her.
Before boarding the French steamer that is to take him to Africa,
Marlow has a brief but strange feeling about his journey: the feeling
that he is setting off for the center of the earth.



Analysis


This section has several concrete objectives. The first
of these is to locate Marlow more specifically within the wider
history of colonialism. It is important that he goes to Africa in
the service of a Belgian company rather than a British one. The
map that Marlow sees in the Company offices shows the continent
overlaid with blotches of color, each color standing for a different
imperial power. While the map represents a relatively neutral way
of describing imperial presences in Africa, Marlow’s comments about
the map reveal that imperial powers were not all the same. In fact,
the yellow patch—“dead in the center”—covers the site of some of
the most disturbing atrocities committed in the name of empire.
The Belgian king, Leopold, treated the Congo as his private treasury,
and the Belgians had the reputation of being far and away the most
cruel and rapacious of the colonial powers. The reference to Brussels
as a “whited sepulchre” is meant to bring to mind a passage from
the Book of Matthew concerning hypocrisy. The Belgian monarch spoke
rhetorically about the civilizing benefits of colonialism, but the
Belgian version of the practice was the bloodiest and most inhumane.

This does not, however, mean that Conrad seeks to indict
the Belgians and praise other colonial powers. As Marlow journeys
into the Congo, he meets men from a variety of European nations,
all of whom are violent and willing to do anything to make their
fortunes. Moreover, it must be remembered that Marlow himself willingly goes
to work for this Belgian concern: at the moment he decides to do
so, his personal desire for adventure far outweighs any concerns he
might have about particular colonial practices. This section of
the book also introduces another set of concerns, this time regarding women. Heart
of Darkness has been attacked by critics as misogynistic,
and there is some justification for this point of view. Marlow’s aunt
does express a naïvely idealistic view of the Company’s mission,
and Marlow is thus right to fault her for being “out of touch with
truth.” However, he phrases his criticism so as to make it applicable
to all women, suggesting that women do not even live in the same
world as men and that they must be protected from reality. Moreover,
the female characters in Marlow’s story are extremely flat and stylized.
In part this may be because Marlow uses women symbolically as representatives
of “home.” Marlow associates home with ideas gotten from books and
religion rather than from experience. Home is the seat of naïveté,
prejudice, confinement, and oppression. It is the place of people
who have not gone out into the world and experienced, and who therefore
cannot understand. Nonetheless, the women in Marlow’s story exert
a great deal of power. The influence of Marlow’s aunt does not stop
at getting him the job but continues to echo through the Company’s
correspondence in Africa. At the Company’s headquarters, Marlow
encounters a number of apparently influential women, hinting that
all enterprises are ultimately female-driven.

Marlow’s departure from the world of Belgium and women
is facilitated, according to him, by two eccentric men. The first
of these is Fresleven, the story of whose death serves to build
suspense and suggest to the reader the transformations that Europeans
undergo in Africa. By European standards, Fresleven was a good and
gentle man, not one likely to die as he did. This means either that
the European view of people is wrong and useless or else that there
is something about Africa that makes men behave aberrantly. Both
of these conclusions are difficult to accept practically or politically,
and thus the story of Fresleven leaves the reader feeling ambivalent
and cautious about Marlow’s story to come.


The second figure presiding over Marlow’s departure is
the Company’s doctor. The doctor is perhaps the ultimate symbol
of futility: he uses external measurements to try to decipher what
he admits are internal changes; moreover, his subjects either don’t
return from Africa or, if they do, don’t return to see him. Thus
his work and his advice are both totally useless. He is the first
of a series of functionaries with pointless jobs that Marlow will
encounter as he travels toward and then up the Congo River.

Part 1 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s journey down the coast of Africa through his
meeting with the chief accountant.</blockquote>

Summary


The French steamer takes Marlow along the coast of Africa,
stopping periodically to land soldiers and customshouse officers.
Marlow finds his idleness vexing, and the trip seems vaguely nightmarish to
him. At one point, they come across a French man-of-war shelling an
apparently uninhabited forested stretch of coast. They finally arrive
at the mouth of the Congo River, where Marlow boards another steamship
bound for a point thirty miles upriver. The captain of the ship,
a young Swede, recognizes Marlow as a seaman and invites him on
the bridge. The Swede criticizes the colonial officials and tells
Marlow about another Swede who recently hanged himself on his way
into the interior.



Marlow disembarks at the Company’s station, which is in
a terrible state of disrepair. He sees piles of decaying machinery
and a cliff being blasted for no apparent purpose. He also sees
a group of black prisoners walking along in chains under the guard
of another black man, who wears a shoddy uniform and carries a rifle.
He remarks that he had already known the “devils” of violence, greed, and
desire, but that in Africa he became acquainted with the “flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
Finally, Marlow comes to a grove of trees and, to his horror, finds
a group of dying native laborers. He offers a biscuit to one of them;
seeing a bit of white European yarn tied around his neck, he wonders
at its meaning. He meets a nattily dressed white man, the Company’s
chief accountant (not to be confused with Marlow’s friend the Accountant
from the opening of the book). Marlow spends ten days here waiting
for a caravan to the next station. One day, the chief accountant
tells him that in the interior he will undoubtedly meet Mr. Kurtz,
a first-class agent who sends in as much ivory as all the others
put together and is destined for advancement. He tells Marlow to
let Kurtz know that everything is satisfactory at the Outer Station
when he meets him. The chief accountant is afraid to send a written
message for fear it will be intercepted by undesirable elements
at the Central Station.



Analysis


Marlow’s description of his journey on the
French steamer makes use of an interior/exterior motif that continues
throughout the rest of the book. Marlow frequently encounters inscrutable
surfaces that tempt him to try to penetrate into the interior of
situations and places. The most prominent example of this is the French
man-of-war, which shells a forested wall of coastline. To Marlow’s
mind, the entire coastline of the African continent presents a solid
green facade, and the spectacle of European guns firing blindly
into that facade seems to be a futile and uncomprehending way of
addressing the continent.

“The flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious
and pitiless folly” is one of the central images with which Marlow
characterizes the behavior of the colonists. He refers back to this
image at a number of key points later in the story. It is thus a
very important clue as to what Marlow actually thinks is wrong about
imperialism—Marlow’s attitudes are usually implied rather than directly stated.
Marlow distinguishes this devil from violence, greed, and desire,
suggesting that the fundamental evil of imperialism is not that
it perpetrates violence against native peoples, nor that it is motivated
by greed. The flabby, weak-eyed devil seems to be distinguished
above all by being shortsighted and foolish, unaware of what it
is doing and ineffective.

The hand of the “flabby devil” is apparent in the travesties
of administration and the widespread decay in the Company’s stations.
The colonials in the coastal station spend all their time blasting
a cliff for no apparent reason, machinery lies broken all around, and
supplies are poorly apportioned, resting in abundance where they
are not needed and never sent to where they are needed. Given the
level of waste and inefficiency, this kind of colonial activity clearly
has something other than economic activity at stake, but just what
that something might be is not apparent. Marlow’s comments on the
“flabby devil” produce a very ambivalent criticism of colonialism.
Would Marlow approve of the violent exploitation and extortion of
the Africans if it was done in a more clear-sighted and effective
manner? This question is difficult to answer definitively.

On the other hand, Marlow is appalled by the
ghastly, infernal spectacle of the grove of death, while the other
colonials show no concern over it at all. For Marlow, the grove
is the dark heart of the station. Marlow’s horror at the grove suggests
that the true evils of this colonial enterprise are dehumanization
and death. All Marlow can offer these dying men are a few pieces
of biscuit, and, despite the fact that Marlow is “not particularly
tender,” the situation troubles him.


In this section, Marlow finally learns the reason for
the journey he is to take up the Congo, although he does not yet
realize the importance this reason will later take on. The chief
accountant is the first to use the name of the mysterious Mr. Kurtz,
speaking of him in reverent tones and alluding to a conspiracy within
the Company, the particulars of which Marlow never deciphers. Again,
the name “Kurtz” provides a surface that conceals a hidden and potentially threatening
situation. It is appropriate, therefore, that the chief accountant
is Marlow’s informant. In his dress whites, the man epitomizes success
in the colonial world. His “accomplishment” lies in keeping up appearances,
in looking as he would at home. Like everything else Marlow encounters,
the chief accountant’s surface may conceal a dark secret, in this
case the native woman whom he has “taught”—perhaps violently and
despite her “distaste for the work”—to care for his linens. Marlow
has yet to find a single white man with a valid “excuse for being
there” in Africa. More important, he has yet to understand why he
himself is there.

Part 1 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s journey to the Central Station through the
arrival of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition.</blockquote>

Summary


Marlow travels overland for two hundred miles with a caravan
of sixty men. He has one white companion who falls ill and must
be carried by the native bearers, who start to desert because of
the added burden. After fifteen days they arrive at the dilapidated
Central Station. Marlow finds that the steamer he was to command
has sunk. The general manager of the Central Station had taken the
boat out two days before under the charge of a volunteer skipper,
and they had torn the bottom out on some rocks. In light of what
he later learns, Marlow suspects the damage to the steamer may have
been intentional, to keep him from reaching Kurtz. Marlow soon meets with
the general manager, who strikes him as an altogether average man
who leads by inspiring an odd uneasiness in those around him and
whose authority derives merely from his resistance to tropical disease.
The manager tells Marlow that he took the boat out in a hurry to
relieve the inner stations, especially the one belonging to Kurtz,
who is rumored to be ill. He praises Kurtz as an exceptional agent
and takes note that Kurtz is talked about on the coast.

<blockquote class="quotation">
The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was
whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.


</blockquote>



Marlow sets to work dredging his ship out of the river
and repairing it, which ends up taking three months. One day during
this time, a grass shed housing some trade goods burns down, and
the native laborers dance delightedly as it burns. One of the natives
is accused of causing the fire and is beaten severely; he disappears
into the forest after he recovers. Marlow overhears the manager
talking with the brickmaker about Kurtz at the site of the burned
hut. He enters into conversation with the brickmaker after the manager
leaves, and ends up accompanying the man back to his quarters, which
are noticeably more luxurious than those of the other agents. Marlow realizes
after a while that the brickmaker is pumping him for information
about the intentions of the Company’s board of directors in Europe,
about which, of course, Marlow knows nothing. Marlow notices an
unusual painting on the wall, of a blindfolded woman with a lighted
torch; when he asks about it, the brickmaker reveals that it is
Kurtz’s work.

The brickmaker tells Marlow that Kurtz is a prodigy, sent
as a special emissary of Western ideals by the Company’s directors
and bound for quick advancement. He also reveals that he has seen
confidential correspondence dealing with Marlow’s appointment, from which
he has construed that Marlow is also a favorite of the administration. They
go outside, and the brickmaker tries to get himself into Marlow’s
good graces—and Kurtz’s by proxy, since he believes Marlow is allied
with Kurtz. Marlow realizes the brickmaker had planned on being
assistant manager, and Kurtz’s arrival has upset his chances. Seeing
an opportunity to use the brickmaker’s influence to his own ends,
Marlow lets the man believe he really does have influence in Europe
and tells him that he wants a quantity of rivets from the coast
to repair his ship. The brickmaker leaves him with a veiled threat
on his life, but Marlow enjoys his obvious distress and confusion.

Marlow finds his foreman sitting on the deck of the ship
and tells him that they will have rivets in three weeks, and they
both dance around exuberantly. The rivets do not come, however.
Instead, the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, a group of white men
intent on “tear[ing] treasure out of the bowels of the land,” arrives,
led by the manager’s uncle, who spends his entire time at the station
talking conspiratorially with his nephew. Marlow gives up on ever
receiving the rivets he needs to repair his ship, and turns to wondering
disinterestedly about Kurtz and his ideals.



Analysis


As Marlow describes his caravan journey through the depopulated interior
of the colony, he remarks ironically that he was becoming “scientifically
interesting”—an allusion to his conversation with the company doctor
in Brussels. Given this, it is curious that Marlow talks so little
about the caravan journey itself. In part, this is because it’s
not directly relevant to his story—during this time he is neither
in contact with representatives of the Company nor moving directly toward
Kurtz. Nonetheless, something about this journey renders Marlow
a mystery even to himself; he starts to think of himself as a potential
case study. Africa appears to him to be something that happens to
a man, without his consent. One way to interpret this is that Marlow
is disowning his own responsibility (and that of his fellow employees)
for the atrocities committed by the Company on the natives. Because
of its merciless environment and savage inhabitants, Africa itself
is responsible for colonial violence. Forced to deal with his ailing
companion and a group of native porters who continually desert and
abandon their loads, Marlow finds himself at the top of the proverbial
slippery slope.

The men he finds at the Central Station allow him to regain
his perspective, however. The goings-on here are ridiculous: for
example, Marlow watches a man try to extinguish a fire using a bucket with
a hole in it. The manager and the brickmaker, the men in charge,
are repeatedly described as hollow, “papier-mâché” figures. For
Marlow, who has just experienced the surreal horrors of the continent’s
interior, the idea that a man’s exterior may conceal only a void
is disturbing. The alternative, of course, is that at the heart
of these men lies not a void but a vast, malevolent conspiracy.
The machinations of the manager and the brickmaker suggest that,
paradoxically, both ideas are correct: that these men indeed conceal bad
intentions, but that these intentions, despite the fact that they lead
to apparent evil, are meaningless in light of their context. The use
of religious language to describe the agents of the Central Station
reinforces this paradoxical idea. Marlow calls the Company’s rank
and file “pilgrims,” both for their habit of carrying staves (with which
to beat native laborers) and for their mindless worship of the wealth
to be had from ivory.



“Ivory,” as it echoes through the air of the camp, sounds
to Marlow like something unreal rather than a physical substance.
Marlow suggests that the word echoes because the station is only
a tiny “cleared speck,” surrounded by an “outside” that always threatens to
close in, erasing the men and their pathetic ambitions. Over and over
again in this section of the book human voices are hurled against
the wilderness, only to be thrown back by the river’s surface or
a wall of trees. No matter how evil these men are, no matter how terrible
the atrocities they commit against the natives, they are insignificant
in the vastness of time and the physical world. Some critics have
objected to Heart of Darkness on the grounds that
it brushes aside or makes excuses for racism and colonial violence,
and that it even glamorizes them by making them the subject of Marlow’s seemingly
profound ruminations.

On a more concrete level, the events of this section move
Marlow ever closer to the mysterious Kurtz. Kurtz increasingly appeals
to Marlow as an alternative, no matter how dire, to the repellent
men around him. The painting in the brickmaker’s quarters, which
Marlow learns is Kurtz’s work, draws Marlow in: the blindfolded woman
with the torch represents for him an acknowledgment of the paradox
and ambiguity of the African situation, and this is a much more
sophisticated response than he has seen from any of the other Europeans
he has encountered. To the reader, the painting may seem somewhat
heavy-handed, with its overtly allegorical depiction of blind and
unseeing European attempts to bring the “light” of civilization
to Africa. Marlow, however, sees in it a level of self-awareness
that offers a compelling alternative to the folly he has witnessed throughout
the Company.

Part 2


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s overhearing of the conversation between the
manager and his uncle through the beginning of his voyage up the
river.</blockquote>

Summary


One evening, as Marlow lies on the deck of his wrecked
steamer, the manager and his uncle appear within earshot and discuss
Kurtz. The manager complains that Kurtz has come to the Congo with
plans to turn the stations into beacons of civilization and moral
improvement, and that Kurtz wants to take over the manager’s position.
He recalls that about a year earlier Kurtz sent down a huge load
of ivory of the highest quality by canoe with his clerk, but that
Kurtz himself had turned back to his station after coming 300 miles
down the river. The clerk, after turning over the ivory and a letter
from Kurtz instructing the manager to stop sending him incompetent
men, informs the manager that Kurtz has been very ill and has not
completely recovered.



Continuing to converse with his uncle, the manager mentions another
man whom he finds troublesome, a wandering trader. The manager’s
uncle tells him to go ahead and have the trader hanged, because
no one will challenge his authority here. The manager’s uncle also
suggests that the climate may take care of all of his difficulties
for him, implying that Kurtz simply may die of tropical disease.
Marlow is alarmed by the apparent conspiracy between the two men
and leaps to his feet, revealing himself to them. They are visibly
startled but move off without acknowledging his presence. Not long
after this incident, the Eldorado Expedition, led by the manager’s
uncle, disappears into the wilderness.

<blockquote class="quotation">
In a few days the Eldorado Expedition
went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea
closes over a diver.


</blockquote>
Much later, the cryptic message arrives that all the expedition’s
donkeys have died. By that time, the repairs on Marlow’s steamer
are nearly complete, and Marlow is preparing to leave on a two-month trip
up the river to Kurtz, along with the manager and several “pilgrims.”
The river is treacherous and the trip is difficult; the ship proceeds
only with the help of a crew of natives the Europeans call cannibals,
who actually prove to be quite reasonable people. The men aboard
the ship hear drums at night along the riverbanks and occasionally
catch glimpses of native settlements during the day, but they can
only guess at what lies further inland. Marlow feels a sense of
kinship between himself and the savages along the riverbanks, but
his work in keeping the ship afloat and steaming keeps him safely
occupied and prevents him from brooding too much.



Analysis


Marlow’s work ethic and professional skills
are contrasted, throughout this section, with the incompetence and
laziness of the Company’s employees. Working to repair his ship
and then piloting it up the river provides a much-needed distraction
for Marlow, preventing him from brooding upon the folly of his fellow
Europeans and the savagery of the natives. To Marlow’s mind, work
represents the fulfillment of a contract between two independent
human beings. Repairing the steamer and then piloting it, he convinces
himself, has little to do with the exploitation and horror he sees
all around him.

Nevertheless, Marlow is continually forced
to interpret the surrounding world. The description of his journey
upriver is strange and disturbing. Marlow describes the trip as
a journey back in time, to a “prehistoric earth.” This remark reflects
the European inclination to view colonized peoples as primitive,
further back on the evolutionary scale than Europeans, and it recalls Marlow’s
comment at the beginning of his narrative about England’s own past.
What disturbs Marlow most about the native peoples he sees along
the river, in his words, is “this suspicion of their not being inhuman”:
in some deep way these “savages” are like Europeans, perhaps just
like the English were when Britain was colonized by Rome. Marlow’s
self-imposed isolation from the manager and the rest of the pilgrims
forces him to consider the African members of his crew, and he is
confused about what he sees. He wonders, for example, how his native
fireman (the crewman who keeps the boiler going) is any different
from a poorly educated, ignorant European doing the same job.

<blockquote class="quotation">
It was unearthly, and the men were—No,
they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion
of their not being inhuman.


</blockquote>
The mysterious figure of Kurtz is at the heart
of Marlow’s confusion. The manager seems to suggest that his own
resistance against the consequences of the tropical climate reflects
not just physical constitution but a moral fitness, or the approval
of some higher power. That this could be the case is terrifying
to Marlow, and in his shock he exposes his disdain of the manager
to the man himself. Yet Marlow has a difficult time analyzing what
he has overheard about Kurtz: if the manager’s story contains any
truth, then Kurtz must be a monomaniacal if not psychotic individual. Next
to the petty ambitions and sycophantic maneuverings of the manager,
however, Kurtz’s grandiose gestures and morally ambiguous successes
are appealing.


Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this section, though,
is how little actually happens. The journey up the river is full
of threatened disasters, but none of them comes to pass, thanks
to Marlow’s skill; the most explosive potential conflict arises
from an act of eavesdropping. The stillness and silence surrounding
this single steamer full of Europeans in the midst of the vast African
continent provoke in Marlow an attitude of restless watchfulness:
he feels as if he has “no time” and must constantly “discern, mostly
by inspiration, [hidden] signs.” In this way, his piloting a steamboat
along a treacherous river comes to symbolize his finding his way
through a world of conspiracies, mysteries, and inaccessible black
faces. Now that both Africa and Europe have become impenetrable
to Marlow, only the larger-than-life Kurtz seems “real.”

Part 2 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">
Marlow’s discovery of the stack of firewood
through the attack on the steamer.


</blockquote>

Summary


Fifty miles away from Kurtz’s Inner Station, the steamer
sights a hut with a stack of firewood and a note that says, “Wood
for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.” The signature is illegible,
but it is clearly not Kurtz’s. Inside the hut, Marlow finds a battered
old book on seamanship with notes in the margin in what looks like
code. The manager concludes that the wood must have been left by
the Russian trader, a man about whom Marlow has overheard the manager complaining.
After taking aboard the firewood that serves as the ship’s fuel,
the party continues up the river, the steamer struggling and threatening
at every moment to give out completely. Marlow ponders Kurtz constantly
as they crawl along toward him.



By the evening of the second day after finding the hut,
they arrive at a point eight miles from Kurtz’s station. Marlow
wants to press on, but the manager tells him to wait for daylight,
as the waters are dangerous here. The night is strangely still and
silent, and dawn brings an oppressive fog. The fog lifts suddenly
and then falls again just as abruptly. The men on the steamer hear
a loud, desolate cry, followed by a clamor of savage voices, and
then silence again. They prepare for attack. The whites are badly
shaken, but the African crewmen respond with quiet alertness. The
leader of the cannibals tells Marlow matter-of-factly that his people
want to eat the owners of the voices in the fog. Marlow realizes
that the cannibals must be terribly hungry, as they have not been
allowed to go ashore to trade for supplies, and their only food,
a supply of rotting hippo meat, was long since thrown overboard
by the pilgrims.

The manager authorizes Marlow to take every risk in continuing on
in the fog, but Marlow refuses to do so, as they will surely ground the
steamer if they proceed blindly. Marlow says he does not think the
natives will attack, particularly since their cries have sounded more
sorrowful than warlike. After the fog lifts, at a spot a mile and a
half from the station, the natives attempt to repulse the invaders. The
steamer is in a narrow channel, moving along slowly next to a high
bank overgrown with bushes, when suddenly the air fills with arrows.
Marlow rushes inside the pilot-house. When he leans out to close
the shutter on the window, he sees that the brush is swarming with
natives. Suddenly, he notices a snag in the river a short way ahead
of the steamer.

The pilgrims open fire with rifles from below him, and
the cloud of smoke they produce obscures his sight. Marlow’s African
helmsman leaves the wheel to open the shutter and shoot out with
a one-shot rifle, and then stands at the open window yelling at
the unseen assailants on the shore. Marlow grabs the wheel and crowds
the steamer close to the bank to avoid the snag. As he does so,
the helmsman takes a spear in his side and falls on Marlow’s feet.
Marlow frightens the attackers away by sounding the steam whistle
repeatedly, and they give off a prolonged cry of fear and despair.
One of the pilgrims enters the pilot-house and is shocked to see
the wounded helmsman. The two white men stand over him as he dies
quietly. Marlow makes the repulsed and indignant pilgrim steer while
he changes his shoes and socks, which are covered in the dead man’s blood.
Marlow expects that Kurtz is now dead as well, and he feels a terrible
disappointment at the thought.

One of Marlow’s listeners breaks into his narrative at
this point to comment upon the absurdity of Marlow’s behavior. Marlow laughs
at the man, whose comfortable bourgeois existence has never brought
him into contact with anything the likes of Africa. He admits that
his own behavior may have been ridiculous—he did, after all, throw
a pair of brand-new shoes overboard in response to the helmsman’s
death—but he notes that there is something legitimate about his
disappointment in thinking he will never be able to meet the man
behind the legend of Kurtz.



Analysis


Marlow makes a major error of interpretation
in this section, when he decides that the cries coming from the
riverbank do not portend an attack. That he is wrong is more or
less irrelevant, since the steamer has no real ability to escape.
The fog that surrounds the boat is literal and metaphorical: it
obscures, distorts, and leaves Marlow with only voices and words
upon which to base his judgments. Indeed, this has been Marlow’s
situation for much of the book, as he has had to formulate a notion
of Kurtz based only on secondhand accounts of the man’s exploits
and personality. This has been both enriching and dangerous for Marlow.
On the one hand, having the figure of Kurtz available as an object
for contemplation has provided a release for Marlow, a distraction
from his unsavory surroundings, and Kurtz has also functioned as
a kind of blank slate onto which Marlow can project his own opinions
and values. Kurtz gives Marlow a sense of possibility. At the same
time, Marlow’s fantasizing about Kurtz has its hazards. By becoming
intrigued with Kurtz, Marlow becomes dangerously alienated from,
and disliked by, the Company’s representatives. Moreover, Marlow
focuses his energies and hopes on a man who may be nothing like
the legends surrounding him. However, with nothing else to go on
and no other alternatives to the manager and his ilk, Marlow has
little choice.


This section contains many instances of contradictory
language, reflecting Marlow’s difficult and uncomfortable position. The
steamer, for example, “tears slowly along” the riverbank: “to tear”
usually indicates great speed or haste, but the oxymoronic addition
of “slowly” immediately strips the phrase of any discernible meaning
and makes it ridiculous. Marlow’s companions aboard the steamer
prove equally paradoxical. The “pilgrims” are rough and violent
men. The “cannibals,” on the other hand, conduct themselves with
quiet dignity: although they are malnourished, they perform their
jobs without complaint. Indeed, they even show flashes of humor,
as when their leader teases Marlow by saying that they would like
to eat the owners of the voices they hear coming from the shore.
The combination of humane cannibals and bloodthirsty pilgrims, all
overseen by a manager who manages clandestinely rather than openly,
creates an atmosphere of the surreal and the absurd. Thus, it is
not surprising when the ship is attacked by Stone Age weaponry (arrows and
spears), and it is equally appropriate that the attack is not repelled
with bullets but by manipulating the superstitions and fears of
those ashore—simply by blowing the steamer’s whistle. The primitive
weapons used by both sides in the attack reinforce Marlow’s notion
that the trip up the river is a trip back in time. Marlow’s response
to the helmsman’s death reflects the general atmosphere of contradiction
and absurdity: rather than immediately mourning his right-hand man, Marlow changes
his socks and shoes.

In the meantime, tension continues to build
as Marlow draws nearer to Kurtz. After the attack, Marlow speculates
that Kurtz may be dead, but the strange message and the book full
of notes left with the firewood suggest otherwise. Marlow does not
need to be told to “hurry up”: his eagerness to meet Kurtz draws
him onward. To meet Kurtz will be to create a coherent whole in
a world sorely lacking in such things; by matching the man with
his voice, Marlow hopes to come to an understanding about what happens
to men in places like the Congo.

Part 2 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s digression about Kurtz through his meeting
with the Russian trader.</blockquote>

Summary


Marlow breaks into the narrative here to offer a digression
on Kurtz. He notes that Kurtz had a fiancée, his Intended (as Kurtz called
her), waiting for him in Europe. Marlow attaches no importance to
Kurtz’s fiancée, since, for him, women exist in an alternate fantasy
world. What Marlow does find significant about Kurtz’s Intended,
though, is the air of possession Kurtz assumed when speaking about
her: indeed, Kurtz spoke of everything—ivory, the Inner Station,
the river—as being innately his. It is this sense of dark mastery
that disturbs Marlow most. Marlow also mentions a report Kurtz has
written at the request of the International Society for the Suppression
of Savage Customs. The report is eloquent and powerful, if lacking
in practical suggestions. It concludes, however, with a handwritten
postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow suggests that this
coda, the “exposition of [Kurtz’s] method,” is the result of Kurtz’s
absorption into native life—that by the time he came to write this
note he had assumed a position of power with respect to the natives
and had been a participant in “unspeakable rites,” where sacrifices
had been made in his name. At this point, Marlow also reveals that
he feels he is responsible for the “care of [Kurtz’s] memory,” and
that he has no choice but to remember and continue to talk about
the man.



At the time Marlow is telling his story, he is still unsure
whether Kurtz was worth the lives lost on his behalf; thus, at this
point, he returns to his dead helmsman and the journey up the river.
Marlow blames the helmsman’s death on the man’s own lack of restraint: had
the helmsman not tried to fire at the men on the riverbank, he would
not have been killed. Marlow drags the helmsman’s body out of the
pilot-house and throws it overboard. The pilgrims are indignant that
the man will not receive a proper burial, and the cannibals seem
to mourn the loss of a potential meal. The pilgrims have concluded
Kurtz must be dead and the Inner Station destroyed, but they are
cheered at the crushing defeat they believe they dealt their unseen
attackers. Marlow remains skeptical and sarcastically congratulates
them on the amount of smoke they have managed to produce. Suddenly,
the Inner Station comes into view, somewhat decayed but still standing.

A white man, the Russian trader, beckons to them from
the shore. He wears a gaudy patchwork suit and babbles incessantly.
He is aware they have been attacked but tells them that everything
will now be okay. The manager and the pilgrims go up the hill to
retrieve Kurtz, while the Russian boards the ship to converse with
Marlow. He tells Marlow that the natives mean no harm (although
he is less than convincing on this point), and he confirms Marlow’s
theory that the ship’s whistle is the best means of defense, since
it will scare the natives off. He gives a brief account of himself:
he has been a merchant seaman and was outfitted by a Dutch trading
house to go into the African interior. Marlow gives him the book
on seamanship that had been left with the firewood, and the trader
is very happy to have it back. As it turns out, what Marlow had
thought were encoded notes are simply notes written in Russian.
The Russian trader tells Marlow that he has had trouble restraining
the natives, and he suggests that the steamer was attacked because
the natives do not want Kurtz to leave. The Russian also offers
yet another enigmatic picture of Kurtz. According to the trader,
one does not talk to Kurtz but listens to him. The trader credits
Kurtz for having “enlarged his mind.”



Analysis


The interruption and digression at the beginning of this
section suggests that Marlow has begun to feel the need to justify
his own conduct. Marlow speaks of his fascination with Kurtz as
something over which he has no control, as if Kurtz refuses to be
forgotten. This is one of a number of instances in which Marlow
suggests that a person’s responsibility for his actions is not clear-cut.
The Russian trader is another example of this: Marlow does not clarify
whether the trader follows Kurtz because of Kurtz’s charisma, or
because of the trader’s weakness or insanity.

Marlow repeatedly characterizes Kurtz as a
voice, suggesting that eloquence is his defining trait. But Kurtz’s
eloquence is empty. Moreover, the picture that Marlow paints of
Kurtz is extremely ironic. Both in Europe and in Africa, Kurtz is
reputed to be a great humanitarian. Whereas the other employees
of the Company only want to make a profit or to advance to a better position
within the Company, Kurtz embodies the ideals and fine sentiments
with which Europeans justified imperialism—particularly the idea
that Europeans brought light and civilization to savage peoples.
But when Marlow discovers him, Kurtz has become so ruthless and
rapacious that even the other managers are shocked. He refers to
the ivory as his own and sets himself up as a primitive god to the
natives. He has written a seventeen-page document on the suppression
of savage customs, to be disseminated in Europe, but his supposed
desire to “civilize” the natives is strikingly contradicted by his
postscript, “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is careful to tell
his listeners that there was something wrong with Kurtz, some flaw
in his character that made him go insane in the isolation of the
Inner Station. But the obvious implication of Marlow’s story is
that the humanitarian ideals and sentiments justifying imperialism
are empty, and are merely rationalizations for exploitation and
extortion.

Marlow’s behavior in the face of an increasingly insane
situation demonstrates his refusal to give in to the forces of madness.
By throwing the dead helmsman overboard, Marlow spares him from becoming
dinner for the cannibals, but he also saves him from what the helmsman
might have found even worse: the hypocrisy of a Christian burial
by the pilgrims. In contrast with the pilgrims’ folly and hypocrisy,
Kurtz’s serene dictatorship is more attractive to Marlow. In fact,
as Marlow’s digression at the beginning of this section suggests,
right and wrong, sane and insane, are indistinguishable in this
world gone mad. Force of personality is the only means by which
men are judged. As Marlow’s ability to captivate his listeners with
his story suggests, charisma may be his link with Kurtz. What the
Russian trader says of Kurtz is true of Marlow too: he is a man to
whom people listen, not someone with whom they converse. Thus, the
darkness in Kurtz may repel Marlow mostly because it reflects his
own internal darkness.

Part 3


<blockquote class="quotation">
The Russian trader’s description of Kurtz
through the Russian trader’s departure from the Inner Station.


</blockquote>

Summary


The Russian trader begs Marlow to take Kurtz
away quickly. He recounts for Marlow his initial meeting with Kurtz,
telling him that Kurtz and the trader spent a night camped in the
forest together, during which Kurtz discoursed on a broad range
of topics. The trader again asserts that listening to Kurtz has
greatly enlarged his mind. His connection to Kurtz, however, has
gone through periods of rise and decline. He nursed Kurtz through two
illnesses but sometimes would not see him for long periods of time,
during which Kurtz was out raiding the countryside for ivory with
a native tribe he had gotten to follow him. Although Kurtz has behaved
erratically and once even threatened to shoot the trader over a
small stash of ivory, the trader nevertheless insists that Kurtz
cannot be judged as one would judge a normal man. He has tried to
get Kurtz to return to civilization several times. The Russian tells
Marlow that Kurtz is extremely ill now. As he listens to the trader,
Marlow idly looks through his binoculars and sees that what he had
originally taken for ornamental balls on the tops of fence posts
in the station compound are actually severed heads turned to face
the station house. He is repelled but not particularly surprised.
The Russian apologetically explains that these are the heads of
rebels, an explanation that makes Marlow laugh out loud. The Russian
makes a point of telling Marlow that he has had no medicine or supplies
with which to treat Kurtz; he also asserts that Kurtz has been shamefully abandoned
by the Company.



At that moment, the pilgrims emerge from the station-house
with Kurtz on an improvised stretcher, and a group of natives rushes
out of the forest with a piercing cry. Kurtz speaks to the natives,
and the natives withdraw and allow the party to pass. The manager
and the pilgrims lay Kurtz in one of the ship’s cabins and give
him his mail, which they have brought from the Central Station.
Someone has written to Kurtz about Marlow, and Kurtz tells him that
he is “glad” to see him. The manager enters the cabin to speak with
Kurtz, and Marlow withdraws to the steamer’s deck. From here he
sees two natives standing near the river with impressive headdresses
and spears, and a beautiful native woman draped in ornaments pacing gracefully
along the shore. She stops and stares out at the steamer for a while
and then moves away into the forest. Marlow notes that she must
be wearing several elephant tusks’ worth of ornaments. The Russian
implies that she is Kurtz’s mistress, and states that she has caused
him trouble through her influence over Kurtz. He adds that he would
have tried to shoot her if she had tried to come aboard. The trader’s
comments are interrupted by the sound of Kurtz yelling at the manager
inside the cabin. Kurtz accuses the men of coming for the ivory
rather than to help him, and he threatens the manager for interfering
with his plans.

The manager comes out and takes Marlow aside, telling
him that they have done everything possible for Kurtz, but that
his unsound methods have closed the district off to the Company
for the time being. He says he plans on reporting Kurtz’s “complete
want of judgment” to the Company’s directors. Thoroughly disgusted
by the manager’s hypocritical condemnation of Kurtz, Marlow tells
the manager that he thinks Kurtz is a “remarkable man.” With this statement,
Marlow permanently alienates himself from the manager and the rest
of the Company functionaries. Like Kurtz, Marlow is now classified
among the “unsound.” As the manager walks off, the Russian approaches
again, to confide in Marlow that Kurtz ordered the attack on the
steamer, hoping that the manager would assume he was dead and turn
back. After the Russian asks Marlow to protect Kurtz’s reputation,
Marlow tells the Russian that the manager has spoken of having the
Russian hanged. The trader is not surprised and, after hitting Marlow
up for tobacco, gun cartridges, and shoes, leaves in a canoe with
some native paddlers.



Analysis


Until this point, Marlow’s narrative has featured prominently
mysterious signs and symbols, which Marlow has struggled to interpret. Now
he confronts the reality of the Inner Station, and witnesses that symbols
possess a disturbing power to define “reality” and influence people.
The natives perceive Kurtz as a mythical deity and think that the
guns carried by his followers are lightning bolts, symbols of power
rather than actual weapons. Marlow and the Russian trader are aware
of the guns’ power to kill, however, and they react nervously at
Kurtz’s show of force. Kurtz himself acts as a symbol for all of
the other characters, not only the natives. To the Russian trader,
he is a source of knowledge about everything from economics to love.
To Marlow, Kurtz offers “a choice of nightmares,” something distinct
from the hypocritical evils of the manager. To the manager and the
pilgrims, he is a scapegoat, someone they can punish for failing
to uphold the “civilized” ideals of colonialism, thereby making
themselves seem less reprehensible. The long-awaited appearance
of the man himself demonstrates just how empty these formulations
are, however. He is little more than a skeleton, and even his name
proves not to be an adequate description of him (Kurtz means “short”
in German, but Kurtz is tall). Thus, both words and symbols are
shown to have little basis in reality.

Kurtz’s African mistress provides another example of the
power of symbols and the dubious value of words. The woman is never given
the title “mistress,” although it seems clear that she and Kurtz have
a sexual relationship. To acknowledge through the use of the term
that a white man and a black woman could be lovers seems to be more
than the manager and the Russian trader are willing to do. Despite
their desire to discredit Kurtz, the transgression implied by Kurtz’s
relationship is not something they want to discuss. To Marlow, the
woman is above all an aesthetic and economic object. She is “superb”
and “magnificent,” dripping with the trappings of wealth. As we
have seen in earlier sections of Marlow’s narrative, he believes that
women represent the ideals of a civilization: it is on their behalf that
men undertake economic enterprises, and it is their beauty that comes
to symbolize nations and ways of life. Thus, Kurtz’s African mistress
plays a role strikingly like that of Kurtz’s fiancée: like his fiancée,
Kurtz’s mistress is lavished with material goods, both to keep her
in her place and to display his success and wealth.

Marlow and the Russian trader offer alternate perspectives throughout
this section. The Russian is naive to the point of idiocy, yet he
has much in common with Marlow. Both have come to Africa in search
of something experiential, and both end up aligning themselves with
Kurtz against other Europeans. The Russian, who seems to exist upon
“glamour” and youth, is drawn to the systematic qualities of Kurtz’s
thought. Although Kurtz behaves irrationally toward him, for the
trader, the great man’s philosophical mind offers a bulwark against
the even greater irrationality of Africa. For Marlow, on the other
hand, Kurtz represents the choice of outright perversion over hypocritical
justifications of cruelty. Marlow and the Russian are disturbingly
similar to one another, as the transfer of responsibility for Kurtz’s
“reputation” from the Russian to Marlow suggests. The manager’s
implicit condemnation of Marlow as “unsound” is correct, if for
the wrong reasons: by choosing Kurtz, Marlow has, in fact, like
the cheerfully idiotic Russian, merely chosen one kind of nightmare
over another.

Part 3 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">
Marlow’s nighttime pursuit of Kurtz through
the steamship’s departure from the Inner Station.


</blockquote>

Summary


Remembering the Russian trader’s warning, Marlow
gets up in the middle of the night and goes out to look around for
any sign of trouble. From the deck of the steamer, he sees one of
the pilgrims with a group of the cannibals keeping guard over the
ivory, and he sees the fires of the natives’ camp in the forest.
He hears a drum and a steady chanting, which lulls him into a brief
sleep. A sudden outburst of yells wakes him, but the loud noise
immediately subsides into a rhythmic chanting once again. Marlow glances
into Kurtz’s cabin only to find that Kurtz is gone. He is unnerved,
but he does not raise an alarm, and instead decides to leave the
ship to search for Kurtz himself.



He finds a trail in the grass and realizes that Kurtz
must be crawling on all fours. Marlow runs along the trail after
him; Kurtz hears him coming and rises to his feet. They are now
close to the fires of the native camp, and Marlow realizes the danger
of his situation, as Kurtz could easily call out to the natives
and have him killed. Kurtz tells him to go away and hide, and Marlow
looks over and sees the imposing figure of a native sorcerer silhouetted
against the fire. Marlow asks Kurtz if he knows what he is doing,
and Kurtz replies emphatically that he does. Despite his physical
advantage over the invalid, Marlow feels impotent, and threatens
to strangle Kurtz if he should call out to the natives. Kurtz bemoans
the failure of his grand schemes, and Marlow reassures him that
he is thought a success in Europe. Sensing the other man’s vulnerability,
Marlow tells Kurtz he will be lost if he continues on. Kurtz’s resolution
falters, and Marlow helps him back to the ship.

The steamer departs the next day at noon, and
the natives appear on the shore to watch it go. Three men painted
with red earth and wearing horned headdresses wave charms and shout incantations
at the ship as it steams away. Marlow places Kurtz in the pilot-house
to get some air, and Kurtz watches through the open window as his
mistress rushes down to the shore and calls out to him. The crowd
responds to her cry with an uproar of its own. Marlow sounds the
whistle as he sees the pilgrims get out their rifles, and the crowd
scatters, to the pilgrims’ dismay. Only the woman remains standing
on the shore as the pilgrims open fire, and Marlow’s view is obscured
by smoke.



Analysis


Marlow describes his developing relationship with Kurtz
in terms of intimacy and betrayal. The extravagant symbolism of
the previous section is largely absent here. Instead, Marlow and
Kurtz confront one another in a dark forest, with no one else around.
Marlow seems to stand both physically and metaphorically between
Kurtz and a final plunge into madness and depravity, as symbolized
by the native sorcerer presiding over the fire at the native camp.
It occurs to Marlow that, from a practical standpoint, he should
strangle Kurtz. The nearness of the natives puts Marlow in danger,
and Kurtz is going to die soon anyway. Yet to kill Kurtz would not
only be hypocritical but, for Marlow, impossible. As Marlow perceives
it, Kurtz’s “crime” is that he has rejected all of the principles
and obligations that make up European society. Marlow “could not
appeal [to him] in the name of anything high or low.” Kurtz has
become an entirely self-sufficient unit, a man who has “kicked himself
loose of the earth.” In a way, the Russian trader is right to claim
that Kurtz cannot be judged by normal standards. Kurtz has already
judged, and rejected, the standards by which other people are judged,
and thus it seems irrelevant to bring such standards back to bear
on him.

Marlow suggests that Africa is responsible
for Kurtz’s current condition. Having rejected European society,
Kurtz has been forced to look into his own soul, and this introspection
has driven him mad. Kurtz’s illness, resulting from his body’s inability
to function outside of a normal (i.e., European) environment, reflects
his psyche’s inability to function outside of a normal social environment.
Despite the hypocrisy latent in social norms, these norms provide
a framework of security and defined expectations within which an
individual can exist. In Freudian terms, we might say that Kurtz
has lost his superego, and that it is the terror of limitless freedom,
with no oversight or punishment, that leads to his madness. Kurtz
now knows himself to be capable of anything. Marlow claims that
his recognition of this capacity forces him to look into Kurtz’s
soul, and that his coming face-to-face with Kurtz is his “punishment.”
Marlow’s epiphany about the roots of Kurtz’s madness does lead to
a moment of profound intimacy between the two men, as Marlow both
comes to understand Kurtz’s deepest self-awareness and in turn is
forced to apply this realization to himself, as he sees that Kurtz’s
actual depravity mirrors his own potential depravity. Given this,
for Marlow to betray Kurtz—whether by killing him or by siding with
the manager against him—would be to betray himself. Later in the
narrative, when Marlow speaks of his “choice of nightmares,” the
alternatives of which he speaks are social injustice and cruelty
on the one hand, and the realization that one’s soul is empty and
infinitely capable of depravity on the other hand.

The pilgrims’ fervent desire to use the natives
for target practice as the steamer departs clearly reflects the
former choice. Kurtz’s mistress and, more generally, his level of
control over the natives at the station are reminders that the kind
of self-immolation that Kurtz has chosen has nothing inherently
noble about it. Kurtz’s realization of his potential for depravity
has not kept him from exercising it. Significantly, Kurtz’s mistress
demonstrates that although Kurtz has “kicked himself loose from
the earth,” he cannot help but reenact some of the social practices
he has rejected. There is something sentimental about her behavior, despite
her hard-edged appearance, and her relationship with Kurtz seems
to have some of the same characteristics of romance, manipulation,
and adoration as a traditional European male-female coupling. Moreover,
as was noted in the previous section, with all her finery she has
come to symbolize value and economic enterprise, much as a European
woman would. Critics have often read her as a racist and misogynist
stereotype, and in many ways this is true. However, the fact that
Kurtz and Marlow both view her as a symbol rather than as a person
is part of the point: we are supposed to recognize that she is actively
stereotyped by Kurtz and by Marlow.

Part 3 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">
Marlow’s journey back down the river
through his falling ill.


</blockquote>

Summary


The current speeds the steamer’s progress back
toward civilization. The manager, certain that Kurtz will soon be
dead, is pleased to have things in hand; he condescendingly ignores
Marlow, who is now clearly of the “unsound” but harmless party. The
pilgrims are disdainful, and Marlow, for the most part, is left alone
with Kurtz. As he had done with the Russian trader, Kurtz takes
advantage of his captive audience to hold forth on a variety of
subjects. Marlow is alternately impressed and disappointed. Kurtz’s
philosophical musings are interspersed with grandiose and childish
plans for fame and fortune.

<blockquote class="quotation">
The brown current ran swiftly out of
the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the
speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly,
too. . . .


</blockquote>



The steamer breaks down, and repairs take some time. Marlow
is slowly becoming ill, and the work is hard on him. Kurtz seems
troubled, probably because the delay has made him realize that he
probably will not make it back to Europe alive. Worried that the manager
will gain control of his “legacy,” Kurtz gives Marlow a bundle of
papers for safekeeping. Kurtz’s ramblings become more abstract and
more rhetorical as his condition worsens. Marlow believes he is
reciting portions of articles he has written for the newspapers:
Kurtz thinks it his “duty” to disseminate his ideas. Finally, one
night, Kurtz admits to Marlow that he is “waiting for death.” As
Marlow approaches, Kurtz seems to be receiving some profound knowledge
or vision, and the look on his face forces Marlow to stop and stare.
Kurtz cries out—“The horror! The horror!”—and Marlow flees, not
wanting to watch the man die. He joins the manager in the dining
hall, which is suddenly overrun by flies. A moment later, a servant
comes in to tell them, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.”

The pilgrims bury Kurtz the next day. Marlow
succumbs to illness and nearly dies himself. He suffers greatly,
but the worst thing about his near-death experience is his realization
that in the end he would have “nothing to say.” Kurtz, he realizes,
was remarkable because he “had something to say. He said it.” Marlow
remembers little about the time of his illness. Once he has recovered
sufficiently, he leaves Africa and returns to Brussels.



Analysis


Both Kurtz and Marlow experience a brief interlude
during which they float between life and death, although their final
fates differ. For Kurtz, the imminence of death ironically causes
him to seek to return to the world from which he had “kicked himself loose.”
Suddenly, his legacy and his ideas seem very important to him, and
he turns to Marlow to preserve them. Kurtz’s final ambitions—to
be famous and feted by kings, to have his words read by millions—suggest
a desire to change the world. This is a change from his previous
formulations, which posited a choice between acquiescence to existing
norms or total isolation from society. However, these final schemes
of Kurtz’s (which Marlow describes as “childish”) reflect Kurtz’s
desire for self-aggrandizement rather than any progressive social
program. Kurtz dies. His last words are paradoxically full of meaning
yet totally empty. It is possible to read them as an acknowledgment
of Kurtz’s own misguided life and despicable acts, as a description
of his inner darkness; certainly, to do so is not inappropriate.
However, it is important to note both their eloquence and their
vagueness. True to form, Kurtz dies in a spasm of eloquence. His
last words are poetic and profound, delivered in his remarkable
voice. However, they are so nonspecific that they defy interpretation.
The best one can do is to guess at their meaning.

<blockquote class="quotation">
I was within a hair’s-breadth of the
last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation
that probably I would have nothing to say.


</blockquote>
Does this mean that Marlow is wrong, that Kurtz has “nothing,” not
“something to say”? Kurtz’s last words could refer to the terrible
nothingness at the heart of his soul and his ideas, the ultimate failure
of his “destiny.” In a way this is true: Kurtz’s agony seems to be
a response to a generalized lack of substance. In his dying words as
in his life, though, Kurtz creates an enigma, an object for contemplation,
which certainly is something. His legacy, in fact, would seem to
be Marlow, who, like the Russian trader, seems to have had his mind
“enlarged” by Kurtz. Marlow, though, finds that he himself has “nothing”
to say, and thus Kurtz’s life and his dying words oscillate between
absolute emptiness and an overabundance of meaning. The “horror”
is either nothing or everything, but it is not simply “something.”

The actual moment of Kurtz’s death is narrated
indirectly. First, Kurtz’s words—“The horror! The horror!”—anticipate and
mark its beginning. Then flies, the symbol of slow, mundane decay
and disintegration (as opposed to catastrophic or dramatic destruction),
swarm throughout the ship, as if to mark the actual moment. Finally,
the servant arrives to bring the moment to its close with his surly,
unpoetic words. The roughness of “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” contrasts
with Kurtz’s self-generated epitaph, again bringing a blunt reality
(death) into conflict with a subjective state (horror). It
is interesting to consider why T. S. Eliot might have chosen the
servant’s line as the epigraph to his poem “The Hollow Men.” The
impenetrability of the brief moment of Kurtz’s death and his reduction
to something “buried in a muddy hole” indicate the final impossibility
of describing either Kurtz or his ideas.



Kurtz’s death is very nearly followed
by Marlow’s demise. Although both men’s illnesses are blamed on
climate, it seems as if they are both also the result of existential
crisis. Furthermore, an element of metaphorical contagion seems
to be involved, as Kurtz transmits both his memory and his poor health
to Marlow. Unlike Kurtz, though, Marlow recovers. Having “nothing
to say” seems to save him. He does not slip into the deadly paradox
of wanting to be both free of society and an influence on it, and
he will not have to sacrifice himself for his ideas. For Marlow,
guarding Kurtz’s legacy is not inconsistent with isolation from
society. Remaining loyal to Kurtz is best done by remaining true
to his experience, and by not offering up his story to those who
will misinterpret or fail to understand it. Marlow keeps these principles
in mind once he arrives in Brussels. His reasons for telling this
story to his audience aboard the Nellie are more
difficult to discern.

Part 3 (continued)


<blockquote class="quotation">Marlow’s return to Brussels through the conclusion.</blockquote>

Summary


Marlow barely survives his illness. Eventually
he returns to the “sepulchral city,” Brussels. He resents the people
there for their petty self-importance and smug complacency. His
aunt nurses him back to health, but his disorder is more emotional
than physical. A bespectacled representative of the Company comes
to retrieve the packet of papers Kurtz entrusted to Marlow, but Marlow
will give him only the pamphlet on the “Suppression of Savage Customs,”
with the postscript (the handwritten “Exterminate all the brutes!”)
torn off. The man threatens legal action to obtain the rest of the
packet’s contents. Another man, calling himself Kurtz’s cousin,
appears and takes some letters to the family. The cousin tells him
that Kurtz had been a great musician, although he does not elaborate
further. Marlow and the cousin ponder Kurtz’s myriad talents and
decide that he is best described as a “universal genius.” A journalist
colleague of Kurtz’s appears and takes the pamphlet for publication.
This man believes Kurtz’s true skills were in popular or extremist
politics.



Finally, Marlow is left with only a few letters and a
picture of Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow goes to see her without really
knowing why. Kurtz’s memory comes flooding back to him as he stands
on her doorstep. He finds the Intended still in mourning, though
it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death. He gives her the packet,
and she asks if he knew Kurtz well. He replies that he knew him
as well as it is possible for one man to know another.

His presence fulfills her need for a sympathetic ear,
and she continually praises Kurtz. Her sentimentality begins to
anger Marlow, but he holds back his annoyance until it gives way
to pity. She says she will mourn Kurtz forever, and asks Marlow
to repeat his last words to give her something upon which to sustain
herself. Marlow lies and tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her
name. She responds that she was certain that this was the case.
Marlow ends his story here, and the narrator looks off into the
dark sky, which makes the waterway seem “to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness.”



Analysis


Marlow’s series of encounters with persons from Kurtz’s
former life makes him question the value he places on his memories
of Kurtz. Kurtz’s cousin and the journalist both offer a version
of Kurtz that seems not to resemble the man Marlow knew. Kurtz,
in fact, seems to have been all things to all people—someone who
has changed their life and now serves as a kind of symbolic figure
presiding over their existence. This makes Marlow’s own experience
of Kurtz less unique and thus perhaps less meaningful. The fact
that he shares Kurtz with all of these overconfident, self-important
people, most of whom will never leave Brussels, causes Kurtz to
seem common, and less profound. In reality, Marlow’s stream of visitors
do not raise any new issues: in their excessive praise of Kurtz
and their own lack of perspective, they resemble the Russian trader,
who also took Kurtz as a kind of guru.

Marlow goes to see Kurtz’s Intended in a state of profound uncertainty.
He is unsure whether his version of Kurtz has any value either as
a reflection of reality or as a philosophical construct. In response
to the woman’s simple question as to whether he knew Kurtz well,
he can only reply that he knew him “‘as well as it is possible for
one man to know another.’” Given what the preceding narrative has
shown about the possibilities for “knowing” another person in any
meaningful sense, the reader can easily see that Marlow’s reply
to Kurtz’s Intended is a qualification, not an affirmation: Marlow
barely knows himself. By the end of Marlow’s visit with the woman,
the reader is also aware, even if Marlow is not, that the kinds
of illusions and untruths which Marlow accuses women of perpetuating
are in fact not dissimilar from those fictions men use to understand
their own experiences and justify such things as colonialism. Marlow
has much more in common with Kurtz’s Intended than he would like
to admit.

Kurtz’s Intended, like Marlow’s aunt and Kurtz’s mistress,
is a problematic female figure. Marlow praises her for her “mature capacity
for fidelity, for belief, for suffering,” suggesting that the most
valuable traits in a woman are passive. Conrad’s portrayal of the
Intended has thus been criticized for having misogynist overtones,
and there is some justification for this point of view. She is a repository
of conservative ideas about what it means to be white and European,
upholding fine-sounding but ultimately useless notions of heroism
and romance.


Although both Marlow and the Intended construct idealized
versions of Kurtz to make sense out of their respective worlds,
in the end, Marlow’s version of Kurtz is upheld as the more profound
one. Marlow emphasizes his disgust at the complacency of the people
he meets in Brussels in order to validate his own store of worldly
experience. Marlow’s narrative implies that his version of Kurtz,
as well as his accounts of Africa and imperialism, are inherently
better and truer than other people’s because of what he has experienced.
This notion is based on traditional ideas of heroism, involving
quests and trials in the pursuit of knowledge. In fact, by seeming
to legitimize activities like imperialism for their experiential
value for white men—in other words, by making it appear that Africa
is the key to philosophical truth—the ending of Heart of
Darkness introduces a much greater horror than any Marlow
has encountered in the Congo. Are the evils of colonialism excusable
in the name of “truth” or knowledge, even if they are not justifiable
in the name of wealth? This paradox accounts at least partially
for the novella’s frame story. Marlow recounts his experiences to
his friends because doing so establishes an implicit comparison.
The other men aboard the Nellie are the kind of
men who benefit economically from imperialism, while Marlow has
benefited mainly experientially. While Marlow’s “truth” may be more
profound than that of his friends or Kurtz’s Intended, it may not
justify the cost of its own acquisition.