The five male friends gathered on board were once sailors, but everyone except Marlow has since changed careers, as Conrad himself had done. Like sail, which was rapidly being displaced by steam-power, Marlow is introduced to us as an anachronism, still devoted to the profession his companions have left behind. During the second half of the 19th century, spurious theories of racial superiority were used to legitimate empire-building, justifying European rule over native populations in places where they had no other obvious right to be.
Marlow, however, is too cynical to accept this convenient fiction. The idea that Africans and Europeans have more in common than the latter might care to admit recurs later, when Marlow describes observing tribal ceremonies on the banks of the river. Heart of Darkness suggests that Europeans are not essentially more highly-evolved or enlightened than the people whose territories they invade.
To this extent, it punctures one of the myths of imperialist race theory. But, as the critic Patrick Brantlinger has argued , it also portrays Congolese villagers as primitiveness personified, inhabitants of a land that time forgot. The horror! The natives took the wood to power the steamboat and Marlow slipped the book in his pocket.
When they were about a mile and a half below the Inner Station, unseen, silent natives who fired small arrows attacked the steamboat. The pilgrims fired their guns into the bush while the attack continued, the helmsman soon being killed by a spear. Finally, Marlow reached the Inner Station. He first saw a "long, decaying building" with a number of posts around it; each post was topped with a "round curved ball.
A White man met them at the shore and reminded Marlow of a harlequin; he informed them that Kurtz was still alive. The Harlequin then explained that the natives attacked Marlow's steamboat because they did not want anyone to take Kurtz away from them. Part 2 of Heart of Darkness offers the reader some of Conrad 's most dense passages. Sentences such as "It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" may seem confusing, but the difficulty here instead is Marlow's, because much of Heart of Darkness concerns how its protagonist struggles to articulate what traveling through the jungle is like.
This attitude may seem patronizing — as if Marlow implies that Africa is unfinished and is ages behind Europe in terms of civilization. However, much of Conrad's novel is a critique of civilization and those who want like Kurtz to bring its "light" into the heart of "darkness. To a European in , the thought of one's kinship with "savages" may, indeed, seem "ugly" — but Marlow's point here is that only someone with the necessary courage could see that the differences between "enlightened" Europe and the "prehistoric" Congo are superficial ones.
This is one of the things that Marlow learns from Kurtz and that is stressed when, during the attack on the steamboat, Marlow sees "a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me very fierce and steady. Still, Marlow is not yet the Buddha preaching in European clothes he will become on board the Nellie. Instead, he concentrates on steering the steamboat and avoiding snags to save his mind from considering all of these philosophical and political implications. Focusing on "work" instead of deeper moral concerns is what saves Marlow's sanity — and by extension, allows the Company to ravage the Congo without a moment's pause.
You might not have ever told anyone about it, but you never forget the sound it makes when you hit the bottom. You remember it, you dream about it, you wake up in a cold sweat about it years later.
Sometimes we had the natives get out and push us through shallow water. We grabbed some of those men on the way to work as a crew on the boat. They brought along some hippo meat, which went bad and smelled horrible. I can still smell it now. I had the manager on board as well, along with three or four of the agents. Sometimes we came across stations huddled against the bank.
The white men we saw there were overjoyed to see us, but they seemed strange. They looked like prisoners held captive by a spell. They would talk to us about ivory for a while, then we would sail on.
There were millions of trees lining the river like a wall. They were massive and made our boat feel like a little bug. After all, we had to keep crawling along. I was crawling towards Kurtz. The steam pipes started leaking, so we crawled very slowly. The river seemed to shrink behind us and get larger in front, like we were being closed in. We sailed deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
It was very quiet.
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