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Unit 31: Joseph Conrad — Heart of Darkness

one of the few instances in which a white man is animalized in this novella. The land is a Notes
living entity, one which has the potential to create evil, or to merge man back into nature.
The proprieties observed by the Manager are all completely fake. Marlows takes this as an
illustration of his hollowness. One of Marlow’s more personally distressing thoughts is his
realization that the “monstrous” tendencies of the black “cannibals” are not inhuman tendencies,
after all; the white men possess them in a different form. The African land serves to equalize
persons in that what often matters most are wit and determination (although firearms and
safety in numbers are important, too).

While traveling, Marlow becomes somewhat delusional. River travel brings back the past—
enlarging and distorting it until it becomes an uncontrollable paranoia that he is being watched.
The telling of the tale takes on the tone of an epic quest that is larger than life. There is
pregnant silence and a failing of the senses. Marlow appears to be traveling deeply into his
own mind. His fanatic interest in the proper working of things is evident when he states that
scraping a ship on the river bottom is “sinful.” The religious language, which in another
context might be humorous, demonstrates Marlow’s mounting panic. This paranoia in turn
diminishes his sense of reality, leaving him searching for a sense of truth and stability—
making him even less reliable and even more distinct from Conrad’s own perspective. Marlow’s
transformation in part helps to explain his obsession with Kurtz. Behind the myth of this
mysterious figure there is a real, substantial person. Kurtz is the bogeyman of the area and,
most logically, the one on whom it is easy for Marlow to fixate.
The inferiority of the natives is a constant theme. About the fireman on his ship, Marlow
remarks “he was there below me ... to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody
of breeches.” The lower physical position of the body corresponds to a mental and social state.
The narrator participates in believing what he describes is the inherent inferiority of the
blacks. In all possible aspects they appear subservient to the white men, and even seeing them
wear pants amounts to no more than a warped joke. The one time that a native actually speaks
is when the ship approaches the brush, right before the attack, and all he has to say is that
any prisoners should be given to the crew as a meal. The narrator cannot understand why the
white men were not eaten. He cannot credit the blacks with intelligence beyond instinct.
During the battle, one native is shot, with Marlow and the Manager watching: “I declare it
looked as though he would presently put to us some question in an understandable language,
but he died without uttering a sound.” For him there is no comprehension of the blacks he
encounters. They are always evaluated and silenced, it seems, before they can speak. Nevertheless,
Marlow does feel a real kinship to his “savage” crew, which places him above other whites
in the narrative. Even here, though, he has shortcomings—his appreciation of the helmsman
after he has died, for instance, seems more machine-like than humane.
The figure of Kurtz grows more enigmatic in this chapter, and we return to the theme of
voices and communication. Communication fails when Marlow cannot decipher the book and
when the note has an incomplete warning. Marlow’s obsession with Kurtz has reached its
height. Talking to him has become the entire reason for Marlow’s passage through this jungle.
The fact that authoritative, unpleasant figures, such as the Manager, dislike Kurtz makes the
reader more receptive to him. Notice that Marlow and Kurtz are the only two characters in the
entire story who are named. Everyone else is titled, detached, and therefore dehumanized.
This is an effective means of drawing a relationship or some kind of comparison between the
two characters before they even meet. As soon as Marlow believes that Kurtz is dead, his
presence begins to dominate him more vividly—Marlow hears his voice, sees him in action.
Kurtz is even stronger than death. The reason Kurtz affects Marlow so deeply is that he has
turned his back on his roots and essentially become native. This demonstrates that there is
much more to Marlow’s personality than what appears. He is not the average European. The

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