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Fiction

Notes his reaction against the colonial structures supported by people with names like “the Manager”
and “the Lawyer” place him slightly outside this system. Groupthink is evident in named
groups like the pilgrims and the natives. These groups have a few outstanding members, such
as the native woman of arresting beauty or the red-haired pilgrim drunk with bloodthirstiness,
but they mostly move together, make the same decisions, and have the same intentions. Conrad
critiques such patterns, in which individual in a society think like other members of their
group without stopping to think for themselves. Although Marlow is by no means a heroic
character, Conrad does illustrate the need for individual thought by singling him out.

Primitivism
As the crew makes their way up the river, they are traveling into the “heart of darkness.” The
contradiction, however, is that Marlow also feels as if he were traveling back in time. When
Conrad wrote this story, scientists were learning that Africa is the seat of human civilization,
and this knowledge is reflected in the fact that the trees are (almost prehistorically) enormous
on the route down the river. The paradox of the novel, however, is that by traveling backwards
in time, the crew do not move closer to the innocence and purity of the “noble savage” but
farther away from it. Words like “pestilent” and “sordid” are used again and again to describe
the natives and their land. Conrad seems to claim that the Christian belief that prehistory was
untouched by obscurity or evil is a fallacy. Instead, there is “the horror.” In contrast, it seems,
is the more advanced civilization of the colonizers and visitors.

Uncertainty

Nothing in this novella is described in very concrete terms. Shores are hazy. Land looks like
a spine sticking out from a man’s back but is not described in topographical terms. Marlow
is obsessed with Kurtz before he even meets him, without a clear idea why. A sense of danger
pervades the entire trip, and it is mostly dictated by uncertainty. The natives do not seem
inherently threatening. On one occasion, they let fly a series of arrows, but these even look
ineffectual to Marlow. They are threatening because they might be poisoned. Similarly, Marlow
has no clear idea of what the natives might do to him if Kurtz gave them free rein, and it is
possible that this uncertainty increases his fear. Kurtz himself is an uncertain figure, ruled as
he is by two separate impulses, the noble and the destructive. At the beginning of the novella,
the reader perceives that the former is his dominant (or only) characteristic. But with vicious
scrawlings on his manuscript and his ruthlessness in extracting ivory from the land, Kurtz
proves himself the latter. Marlow’s adherence to Kurtz until the end confuses the matter; one
could judge him one way or the other. The idea of “darkness” expresses the theme of uncertainty
in the novella.

Imperial Authority

Whatever the conditions in Africa may be, all of the characters agree that they are different
from those of Europe. There is a feeling of anything-goes vigilantism that shifts the balance
of power from the stewards in a “civilized” state (police, doctors, bureaucrats) to whoever is
most threatening. Kurtz is physically quite a weak man, but he maintains enormous sway over
the native population through his understanding of their language and his cultural and communication
skills. He exploits their appreciation of him as an Other. Marlow’s men use a much more
simple means of gaining authority, namely, firearms. This is the tragedy of imperialism in that
the arrival of the white man heralds a new order, but in the creation of that order, they retain
the tools and the authority. Black men in this book first appear as members of a chain gang,
and they gain little power after that scene.

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