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JOSEPH CONRAD: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Joseph Conrad didn't set out to become one of the great English
novelists.  He didn't set out to be a novelist at all, but a
sailor, and besides, he wasn't English.  English was his third
language and he didn't begin learning it until after he was 20
years old!

He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in an area
of Poland that was part of Russia and is now part of the Soviet
Union.  The Poles were fighting for independence from Russia,
and both parents were fiercely engaged in the struggle.
Conrad's father was arrested in 1861 for revolutionary activity,
and the family was exiled to the remote Russian city of Vologda.
On the journey there, four-year-old Conrad caught pneumonia.  He
remained a sickly child, and he suffered from ill health for the
rest of his life.

Conditions in Vologda were grueling.  They were too much for
Conrad's mother, and although the family was eventually allowed
to move to a milder climate, she died of tuberculosis when
Conrad was only seven years old.  His father's spirit was
broken, and so was his health.  The Czarist government finally
let him return with Conrad to the Polish city of Cracow, but he
died there after a year, when Conrad was eleven.

For the next several years Conrad was raised by his maternal
grandmother.  A stern but devoted uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, saw
to his education.  Bobrowski had a lot to put up with.  Conrad
wasn't much of a student.  (Surprisingly, he didn't show any
particular talent for languages; even his Polish could have
stood improvement.) What was worse, at the age of 14 the boy got
the unheard-of notion--unheard-of in land-locked Poland, that
is--that he wanted to become a sailor.  Bobrowski packed him off
for Europe with a tutor who was supposed to talk sense into him,
but the tutor ended up pronouncing Conrad "hopeless" and giving
up the struggle.  In 1874, at the age of 16, Conrad traveled to
Marseilles to learn the seaman's trade.

During his four years in the French merchant marine, Conrad
sailed to the West Indies and possibly along the coast of
Venezuela, and he had an adventure smuggling guns into Spain.
He participated fully in the cultural life of Marseilles, and a
little too fully in the social life.  He got himself into a
spectacular mess.  Deeply in debt, he invited a creditor to tea
one evening and shot himself while the man was on his way over.
His uncle received an urgent telegram:  "Conrad wounded, send
money--come." He did, and he was relieved to find young Conrad
in good shape (except for his finances)--handsome, robust, well
mannered and, above all, an excellent sailor.  The author would
later claim, rather romantically, that he got a scar on his left
breast fighting a duel.

Since the young man couldn't serve on another French ship
without becoming a French citizen, which would have entailed the
possibility of being drafted, he signed on at the age of 20 to
an English steamer.  The year was 1878.  For the next 16 years
he sailed under the flag of Britain, becoming a British subject
in 1886.  Life in the merchant marine took him to ports in Asia
and the South Pacific, where he gathered material for the novels
he still--amazingly--didn't know he was going to write.  His
depressive and irritable disposition didn't make sea life any
easier for him.  He quarreled with at least three of his
captains, and he continued to suffer from periods of poor health
and paralyzing depression.

In 1888 Conrad received his first command, as captain of the
Otago, a small ship sailing out of Bangkok.  It was grueling
journey:  three weeks to Singapore owing to lack of wind, and
the whole crew riddled with fever; from there to Melbourne,
Australia, where he decided to resign the command and return to
England.  The maddening calms of the voyage, and his
uncomfortable position as a stranger on his first command,
provided the inspiration 21 years later for the outlines of "The
Secret Sharer."

Back in England, Captain Korzeniowski (as he was still known)
wasn't able to find another command, and so through the
influence of relatives in Brussels he secured an appointment as
captain of a steamship on the Congo River:  At the age of 9, he
had put his finger on the blank space in the middle of a map of
Africa and boasted, "when I grow up I shall go there"; at 32, he
was fulfilling a lifelong dream.  But the dream quickly turned
into a nightmare.  "Everything is repellent to me here," he
wrote from the Congo, "Men and things, but especially men." The
"scramble for loot" disgusted him; the maltreatment of the black
Africans sickened him; and as if that weren't enough, he
suffered from fever and dysentery that left his health broken
for the rest of his life.  Though his experiences in Africa were
to form the basis of his most famous tale, Heart of Darkness, he
returned to England traumatized.  His outlook, already gloomy,
became even blacker.

Though Captain Korzeniowski didn't know it, his sea career was
drawing to a close.  In 1889 he had started a novel based on his
experiences in the East.  He worked on it in Africa and on his
return, and in 1895 it was published as Almayer's Folly by
Joseph Conrad.  (Years of hearing the British garble
"Korzeniowski" convinced him to put something they could
pronounce on the title page.) It was, like most of his books
over the next two decades, a critical but not a popular success.
Writing was an agony for Conrad:  he was painfully slow at it,
though the necessity of getting paid made him work faster than
he liked.  As a result of hurry, he never felt satisfied with
the finished product.  (Of the masterful Heart of Darkness he
wrote at the time, "it is terribly bad in places and falls short
of my intention as a whole.") Marriage and the birth of two sons
made his financial strain even more desperate.  Periods of
intense productivity (such as the mere two months in which he
completed Heart of Darkness) alternated with periods of despair
in which nothing got written, as well as with his recurrent
bouts of nervous exhaustion and gout.  A description Conrad gave
of his father could have described himself:  "A man of great
sensibilities; of exalted and dreamy temperament; with a
terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition."

Although Conrad's income from writing remained small, his
reputation steadily grew.  He could count among his friends and
admirers such famous names as Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane, H.
G.  Wells, Bertrand Russell, and his idol, Henry James.
Financial security eventually came:  in 1910 he was awarded a
small pension; an American collector began purchasing his
manuscripts; and his novel Chance, serialized in 1912 and
published in book form two years later on both sides of the
Atlantic, became his first bestseller.

Conrad died in 1924 at the age of 66.  He had attained
international renown, but even then he was popularly regarded
mainly as a teller of colorful adventures and sea stories.  But
his experiments in style and technique exerted a major influence
on the development of the modern novel.  Since his death, the
profundity--and darkness--of his vision have become widely
recognized.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE PLOT

On a boat anchored in the Thames River outside London, a sailor
by the name of Marlow observes to several friends that this land
was once a place of darkness, an uncivilized wilderness.  This
reflection leads him to remember an incident in his past, when
he commanded a steamboat on the Congo River; his story forms the
remainder of the novel.

In his tale Marlow is a young man eager to see the unexplored
African jungles.  An influential aunt in Brussels secures him an
appointment as captain of a Congo steamer.  But when he reaches
the Company's Outer Station in Africa, he's confronted with a
spectacle of black slavery and white greed.  In a shady grove he
discovers a crew of sickly African workers who have crawled away
to die.  He also meets the Company's very proper chief
accountant, who mentions a certain Mr.  Kurtz--a remarkable
agent who has sent more ivory back from the jungle than the
other agents combined.  Marlow's interest in Kurtz will grow
eventually into an obsession and become the focus of the
story.

After a difficult overland trek, Marlow arrives at the Company's
Central Station, where he learns that the steamer he was
supposed to command has been wrecked.  He meets the local
manager, an unlikable and unfeeling man, who mentions that Mr.
Kurtz is rumored to be ill at his station upriver and that it's
essential to get to him as soon as possible.

One night as the others are fighting a blaze in one of the
sheds, Marlow talks with one of the agents at the station, a
brickmaker, who speaks of Kurtz with admiration but also
resentment at the talents that make him such a likely candidate
for promotion.  Kurtz, he says, is one of those men who have
come to Africa not merely for gain but with the noble idea of
spreading enlightenment across the backward continent.

Dozing one evening on the deck of his steamer, Marlow overhears
a conversation between the manager and his uncle, an explorer.
It's obvious that the manager despises Kurtz--partly for his
high ideals and partly because, like the brickmaker, he resents
Kurtz's abilities.

After three months of repairs, Marlow, the manager, and a crew
of three or four whites and some 30 Africans begin the tedious
voyage upriver to Kurtz's station, through a jungle that strikes
Marlow as weird, foreboding, and gigantic.  Fifty miles below
the station they come upon a reed hut with wood stacked for the
steamboat and a message for them to approach cautiously.

A couple of mornings later they awaken surrounded by a thick fog
through which they hear a tumult of threatening cries.  Once the
fog lifts they set sail again.  Suddenly they're assailed by a
shower of arrows.  As the white men on board fire hysterically
(and ineptly) into the brush, Marlow steers close to the shore
to avoid a snag, and his African helmsman gets a spear between
the ribs.  Marlow jerks at the steam whistle, and as it
screeches the attackers flee in terror at the noise.  He casts
the dead helmsman overboard in order to keep the hungry cannibal
crew from being tempted by such a meal.

Soon they arrive at the Inner Station, where they're greeted
enthusiastically by a young Russian sailor who has been nursing
Kurtz through a grave illness; it was he who left the pile of
wood and the message.  The wilderness, we learn, preyed on
Kurtz's nerves, and he began to go mad; he participated in
"unspeakable rites" and scrawled at the end of a high-toned,
idealistic report about improving the savages through
benevolence, "Exterminate all the brutes!" Although the Russian
is a fanatical admirer of Kurtz's brilliance, he admits that
Kurtz seized his ivory from the Africans through violence,
brutality, and intimidation.  Even as he's chattering, Marlow
notices that the posts in front of the station house are crowned
with heads.

Mr.  Kurtz finally appears, borne on a stretcher.  Marlow, well
aware that Kurtz doesn't really want to leave the jungle where
he's treated as a god, knows that with a word to his African
army Kurtz could have them all slaughtered.  But Kurtz allows
himself to be carried aboard the steamer, although a magnificent
and ferocious African woman seems ready to lead another
attack.

The manager tells Marlow he disapproves of Kurtz--not because of
his brutality, but only because his methods have made further
plundering of the district temporarily difficult.  The young
Russian visits Marlow and discloses that the earlier attack on
the steamer was ordered by Kurtz; then he steals away into the
jungle.  He fears the manager who hates the Russian because his
ivory trading gives the Company competition.

Late that night Kurtz escapes and crawls ashore, but Marlow
discovers his absence and cuts him off before he reaches his
followers' camp.  They make a tense departure the next day,
surrounded by warriors who seem ready to attack under the
leadership of the barbaric woman.  But Marlow sounds the whistle
and frightens them off.

As they steam back downriver, Kurtz's life slowly ebbs away.  On
his deathbed he has what seems to be a moment of illumination,
of complete knowledge, and he cries out, "The horror!  The
horror!" before he dies.

Then Marlow too is taken by the fever and very nearly dies.  But
he survives and returns to Brussels, where, more than a year
after Kurtz's death, he pays a visit to Kurtz's Intended, the
woman he was engaged to marry.  She's still in mourning,
heartbreakingly devoted to the memory of a man she thinks was
noble and generous to the end.  When she pleads that Marlow
repeat Kurtz's last words to her, he can't bear to shatter her
illusions:  "The last word he pronounced was--your name," he
lies.  She cries out and collapses in tears.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  CHARLIE MARLOW

Through the first two thirds of Heart of Darkness, our curiosity
about Kurtz is raised to such a pitch that we may realize only
afterward, in thinking about the novel, that the main character
isn't Kurtz at all, but Marlow.  We find out less about Kurtz
than about his effect on Marlow's life.  Heart of Darkness tells
the story of Marlow's spiritual journey--a voyage of discovery
and self-discovery.

It seems safe to assume that Marlow is Conrad's stand-in.
Marlow was born in England, not Poland, and he never gave up
sailing to write; but otherwise the differences between the two
men aren't striking.  And we know that Heart of Darkness,
especially in its first half, is heavily autobiographical.

Marlow tends to keep his own counsel:  he's always observing and
judging, but his politeness covers up the harshness of his
judgments and encourages others to speak their minds.  The
brickmaker and the manager both speak frankly to him because his
mask of courtesy hides his contempt for them.  (Later, when his
experiences have so upset him that he's on the verge of a
breakdown, Marlow does speak sarcastically to the manager, and
he's never forgiven for it.)

We don't learn much about Marlow's life before the Congo voyage,
beyond the simple fact that he is an experienced sailor who has
seen the world.  But we do get to know Marlow quite well.  He is
a man of modesty and courage.  We know about his modesty from
his embarrassment at his aunt's high praises.  And we see many
examples of his courage, most notably during the attack on the
steamer and at Kurtz's escape.  At such times Marlow always
keeps a cool head; but in telling the story he never emphasizes
his own daring or heroism.

Marlow is obviously an excellent sailor, devoted to his work; he
enjoys remembering, and making us attentive to, the technical
details and difficulties of getting an old steamboat up a
shallow river.  His fondness for work is at the very base of his
system of values.  Although you may not like work--nobody does,
he admits--it's what keeps you sane, just as it keeps Marlow
sane in the jungle.  It provides a structure for your life, and
if you concentrate on the details of your duties, you won't be
tempted by the call of madness, the "darkness" of the unknown
that surrounds us.

Marlow is the moral grounding point of the novel, the only white
man in the Congo who recognizes the evils of colonialism in
Africa.  The spectacle of death and enslavement there is
overwhelming, so Marlow's responses (as he would probably argue)
aren't extraordinarily moral, just normal, the only normal ones
we see amid the demented greed of the traders.  But Marlow is
also the everyman of the novel, the basically decent and
intelligent character who stands for all of us.  The ugly truths
he confronts are truths we all have to face.  Marlow learns that
he has to acknowledge his own heart of darkness, the call of the
primitive in his own nature.  (Conrad puts this symbolically
when, late in the story, Marlow confuses the pounding of the
savage drum with the beating of his own heart.) And this is the
lesson he tries to impart to his listeners--and to us.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ

Almost from the moment Marlow arrives at the Outer Station he
starts hearing about Mr.  Kurtz--from the accountant, the
manager, the brickmaker, and finally from the Russian.  And he
tells us a lot about Kurtz himself, especially during the long
digression that comes just after the attack, a few pages before
the end of Chapter II.  But Kurtz himself is on the scene for
only a few pages, and we learn less about him from observation
than we do from what these other characters say about him.  In
fact, after all the build-up, his appearance may even seem a
little disappointing:  he never turns out to be as exciting as
the "unspeakable rites" we're told he participated in.  But
Kurtz is more important for what he represents than for what he
does--we don't get to see him do much of anything.  Although he
isn't the subject of the novel (Marlow's spiritual journey is),
you could call him the focus, the catalyst to whom the other
characters react.  He's more present in his effect on others
than in himself.  Some characters, such as the Russian and the
Intended, are defined almost solely by their relationship to
him.

But though he isn't strongly present as a personality, as a
symbol he's a figure rich with meaning.  Kurtz is a microcosm--a
whole in miniature--of the white man's failure in Africa:  he
goes equipped with the finest technology and the highest
philanthropic ideals and ends up injuring (even killing) the
Africans and stealing their ivory.  He reduces technology to the
guns he uses to plunder ivory.

Kurtz also shows us the consequence of inadequate
self-knowledge.  He journeys to Africa eager to do good, and
completely unaware of the dark side of his nature, the side that
will respond to the call of the primitive.  (It's Marlow who
comes to know this side of himself.) Kurtz points up one of the
morals of Marlow's tale:  if you aren't aware of the darkness
within you, you won't know how to fight it if you ever need
to.

If Marlow stands for work, Kurtz represents the opposite value,
talk.  Before meeting him, Marlow can imagine him only talking,
not doing; and when Marlow does finally come face-to-face with
him, Kurtz is so thin from disease that he seems to be little
more than a strong, deep voice.  His influence on people (the
Russian, the Intended, even the accountant and the brickmaker)
comes through his eloquent words.  He is, fittingly, a
journalist (a profession for which Conrad seems to hold little
regard:  Marlow is disgusted by the "rot let loose in print" in
the Belgian papers).  One of his colleagues thinks he would have
made a fine radical politician:  after all, if he could sway
individuals by his words, couldn't he sway masses as well?
Conrad was conservative in his own politics; he would have
disapproved of Kurtz the demagogue, the radical orator.

Actions, Marlow seems to be saying, can't lie; but words can and
do.  And Kurtz is associated with lies.  After explaining that
Kurtz (kurz) is German for short, Marlow tells us:  "Well, the
name was as true as everything else in his life--and death.  He
looked at least seven feet long" (Chapter III).  Kurtz's ideals
turn out to be lies when he drops them to become a devil-god in
the jungle.  In fact, there is something contaminating in the
aura of lies that surrounds him.  Thus, as Marlow is drawn to
him, he finds himself almost irresistibly lying (to the
brickmaker), and he continues lying even after Kurtz's death (to
the Intended).

But Kurtz has one quality that even in his degradation places
him on a level above most of the other whites Marlow encounters
in Africa.  That quality is consciousness.  Kurtz recognizes the
evil of his actions; in fact, as the Russian informs us, he
suffers from that knowledge.  The other whites in Africa commit
acts (the enslavement and massacre of huge numbers of people)
that they don't even recognize as wrong.  So when Marlow talks
about the "choice of nightmares" represented by the manager and
Kurtz, he puts his loyalty with Kurtz, who at least isn't petty,
though he is brutal.  The manager, on the other hand, is a
talentless nobody who in his pettiness still brings suffering to
others.  The depths to which Kurtz sinks is a measure of the
heights he could have risen to.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE RUSSIAN

When Marlow finally arrives at Kurtz's Inner Station, he
encounters a young Russian sailor whose outfit is so colorfully
patched that he reminds Marlow of a harlequin, the traditional
Italian clown who dresses in motley.  And he's as simple-minded
and almost as ridiculous as a clown--a startling instance of
innocence in the midst of depravity, and a peculiar contrast to
Kurtz.  (He also serves as a plot device, filling us in on
details about Kurtz we need to know.) Though he is "Kurtz's last
disciple" and apparently even witnessed the "unspeakable rites"
Kurtz participated in, he's too childlike to have taken part
himself.  Marlow even admires his adventurous spirit, though he
disapproves of his devotion to Kurtz.

But even his devotion makes him sympathetic.  He nursed Kurtz
through two serious illnesses without medical supplies, and he
received little gratitude in return.  (Kurtz even threatened to
shoot him to get his small hoard of ivory.) In addition to
loyalty, his character is marked by "the glamour of youth" and
"the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of
adventure." He has wandered the jungles for two years, mostly
alone; and he makes his exit headed for more lonely wanderings.
He is full of self-doubt, he has no great thoughts and no
abilities, he tells Marlow.  No wonder such an impressionable
youth is mesmerized by "Kurtz's magnificent eloquence."

But the Russian sailor is also a fool.  Marlow tells us that a
fool is safe from madness in the jungle:  you can be "too dull
even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness"
(Chapter II).  The Russian is so awed by Kurtz's ideas ("That
man has enlarged my mind," he exclaims) that he becomes morally
blind to the evil Kurtz does.  Yet he is not malicious himself;
in fact, he's one of the very few whites along the Congo who
isn't a scoundrel.  So it's appropriate that he doesn't work for
the odious Company.  (His free-agent status, in fact, is what
makes the manager want to hang him.)

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE MANAGER

If Heart of Darkness has a villain, it's the manager of the
Company's Central Station, who accompanies Marlow on the
steamboat to the Inner Station.  But he's a villain in a rather
general sense, standing in Marlow's eyes for all the bloodless
bureaucrats who calmly oversee the Company's mass enslavement of
the Africans.  He has no moral sensibility, just a business
sensibility:  Kurtz's foulest crimes are, to his mind,
"deplorable" only because "the trade will suffer" on account of
them (Chapter III).

The manager is a talentless nobody with no special abilities.
His Central Station is a chaotic mess.  The only claim he has to
his position is his hardy constitution:  he doesn't catch the
tropical diseases that overwhelm other whites (including Kurtz
and Marlow).  That gives him staying power.

Practically the first thing Marlow says about the manager is,
"He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and
in voice" (Chapter I); and the long description that follows
emphasizes his commonness.  In this he is certainly the opposite
of his rival, Kurtz, of whom Marlow remarks, "Whatever he was,
he was not common" (Chapter II).  He resents Kurtz so much that
he seems to be willing to let the trade suffer by sabotaging
him.  Marlow hints that he intentionally sank the steamer so
that Kurtz, already ill, would die before help reached the Inner
Station.

So his blandness conceals a deeper malignancy, which becomes
most apparent as he watches Kurtz's slow death with
satisfaction:  "the 'affair' had come off as well as could be
wished" (Chapter III).  He half-starves the boat's African crew
by refusing to stop to let them trade for food on shore.  (He
has plenty of his own.)

Unlike Kurtz, he can exercise restraint:  "He was just the kind
of man who would wish to preserve appearances.  That was his
restraint" (Chapter II).  He cares a lot more about the
appearance of being an upright manager than about the actual
wrongs he commits.  His crimes have the approval of
society--most of them just involve carrying on the business of
the big bureaucratic death-machine known as the Company.

Incidentally, the manager is based on the real-life Camille
Delcommune, manager of a Congo trading station at which Conrad
was stationed in much the same capacity as Marlow.  He wrote to
his aunt (September 26, 1890):  "The manager is a common
ivory-dealer with sordid instincts who considers himself a
merchant though he is only a kind of African shop-keeper.  His
name is Delcommune....  I can hope for neither promotion nor
increase of salary while he remains here." The dislike was
mutual, so we can be sure that the portrait of the rotten
manager is at least partly an act of revenge.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE BRICKMAKER

The brickmaker of the Central Station takes Marlow aside and
tries to pump him for information under the mistaken impression
that Marlow has highly influential connections in Europe.  He
would seem like more of a villain if he weren't so pathetically
ineffective--as Marlow observes, he can't even manage to make
bricks.  (His attempt to get information from Marlow is so
obvious and incompetent that it's comical.) He is a young
aristocrat who toadies shamelessly to the manager, doing his
menial secretarial tasks.  The alliance has brought him a few
special privileges, and also the dislike of the other pilgrims,
who think he's the manager's spy.--He's capable, as he
demonstrates with Marlow, of fawning one minute and making
veiled threats the next.  Like his ally the manager, he resents
Kurtz because he fears that if the highly efficient Kurtz is
promoted to general manager, his own position will be
endangered.  The brickmaker is typical of the malaise that
cripples all the Company's trading stations.  Instead of a
"devotion to efficiency" (which Marlow says early on is the
saving grace of colonialism), he's devoted to himself.  Trade
and progress concern him a lot less than a possible promotion.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE ACCOUNTANT

On first arriving at the Outer Station, Marlow becomes
acquainted with the Company's chief accountant for Africa, a man
who, in his "devotion to efficiency," is the very opposite of
the brickmaker and the other pilgrims of the Central Station.
His books are in "apple-pie order," and he really does care
about his job, just as he cares about his appearance, which is
immaculate.  Marlow admires him.  Further, the accountant thinks
highly of Kurtz.  After all, such an efficient worker would have
no reason to fear for his job (unlike the manager and the
brickmaker) if Kurtz were promoted, which he calmly predicts is
what will happen.  He holds the rest of the agents of the
Central Station in little regard, and even suggests that to send
Kurtz a letter through there would be imprudent because the
agents there might snoop into it.

However, the accountant's devotion to efficiency blinds him to
the sufferings of both whites and blacks in Africa.  When a sick
agent is brought into his office, he complains that the groans
distract him from his work; he is not particularly concerned
that the man is dying.  He hates the Africans "to the death"
simply because they make noise.  Perhaps Conrad is
suggesting--though not explicitly--that even at its best the
Company is inhumane, caring more about numbers than about
people.  When Marlow last sees the accountant, he tells us he is
"bent over his books,...  making correct entries of perfectly
correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could
see the still tree-tops of the grove of death" where a group of
exhausted natives have crawled to die (Chapter I).  "Perfectly
correct transactions" is an ironic way of phrasing it.  How
could transactions that lead to wholesale death be perfectly
correct?

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ'S INTENDED

Marlow meets the woman Kurtz was engaged to marry, his Intended
(it is always capitalized), after Kurtz has been dead for more
than a year.  She is living under the delusion that Kurtz was
generous, kind, and noble to the end, and Marlow doesn't choose
to enlighten her.  He lies that Kurtz died with her name on his
lips.  (Proper Victorian that he is, Marlow thinks it fitting
and just that women be relegated to the world of "beautiful
illusions.") But he pays a price for his dishonesty.  The sudden
recognition of how intimately goodness and lies are mingled in
the world almost drives him to despair.

Though there's something saintly about the Intended, there's
also something slightly repellent in the intensity of her
delusion.  She's linked by a gesture to Kurtz's savage mistress.
And just as that woman represents the soul of the jungle in all
its cruelty, the Intended is the soul of civilization, a
civilization woven partly of truth and partly of the lies we
need to go on living.  The Belgian public needs the lie of the
Company's high ideals and philanthropic intentions in order to
stomach the colonization of the Congo; likewise, the Intended
needs the lie of Kurtz's ideals and intentions to believe that
he died for a worthwhile cause.  But as Marlow perceives how
necessary it is to lie, Kurtz's final judgment--"The horror!
The horror!"--rings in his ears, and it suddenly seems like a
judgment not just on Kurtz's own life and the darkness of
Africa, but a judgment on even the best, the most beautiful
parts of civilization--including the drawing room of this loyal,
tragic woman.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ'S MISTRESS

Talking of Kurtz, Marlow says that the wilderness had "loved
him, embraced him" (Chapter II), and Conrad gives us a vivid
symbol of that embrace in Kurtz's savage mistress.  Marlow calls
her the soul of the jungle--"wild and, gorgeous," "savage and
superb," and like the jungle, dangerous.  She seems to be a
leader of Kurtz's army; at least, she's the most fearless of his
followers, the only one not petrified by the shriek of the steam
whistle.  As the boat departs, Marlow reports she "stretched
tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering
river" (Chapter III); and it's this gesture that reminds Marlow
of her when he sees the Intended "put out her arms as if after a
retreating figure...  across the fading and narrowing sheen of
the window" in her drawing room.  One woman represents the
civilization that loses Kurtz; the other symbolizes the jungle
that destroys him.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE PILGRIMS

The "pilgrims," as Marlow sarcastically calls them, are the 20
or so agents at the Central Station who carry long staves like
actual religious travelers and talk so much about ivory that
"You would think they were praying to it." Lazy and
self-satisfied, they represent the worst of the whites in
Africa:  "as to effectually lifting a little finger--oh, no"
(Chapter I).  At one of the Congo trading stations Conrad
visited, he recorded in his diary:  "Prominent characteristic of
the social life here; people speaking ill of each other." He
must have been remembering this behavior when he wrote that the
pilgrims "beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against
each other in a foolish kind of way" (Chapter I).  Although he
despises them, Conrad uses the pilgrims for comic relief,
especially on the trip upriver.  (Three or four of them
accompany Marlow and the manager.) During the attack, their
terror and their wild gunfire are incongruously funny.  But the
pilgrims are also bloodthirsty; they enjoy massacring Africans.
"Don't!  don't you frighten them away," they cry when Marlow
scares off their human targets with the screech of the steam
whistle (Chapter III).

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE CANNIBALS

On the trip upriver Marlow enlists a crew of about 30 cannibals
to do the boat's manual labor.  In contrast to the idiotic
pilgrims, Conrad portrays the cannibals with dignity.  They grow
increasingly hungry on board, especially after the pilgrims
throw their provision of stinking hippo meat overboard and the
manager refuses to stop to trade for food on shore.  Marlow
tries to imagine why they don't eat him and the pilgrim, and the
only answer he can offer is the restraint he values so highly in
civilized people:  "Restraint!  I would just as soon have
expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of
a battlefield.  But there was the fact facing me" (Chapter II).
Marlow respects them:  "They were men one could work with, and I
am grateful to them." Work is one of Marlow's highest values,
and the pilgrims, we know, are terrible workers.  In fact, the
pilgrims are always behaving on a level beneath what you would
expect of civilized men, while the cannibals keep acting on a
level above what you would expect of savages.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE FIREMAN

The fireman is an African who has been trained to operate the
boat's vertical boiler.  Marlow says, ironically, that through
instruction he's an "improved specimen," but he doesn't really
understand the machine--he thinks there's an evil spirit inside
who gets angry if you don't give him enough water.  The fireman
is an expression of Conrad's pessimism about civilizing the
jungle.  It can be done--perhaps--but it will be a long, slow
process, much more difficult than all the glib, idealistic talk
about "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways"
(Chapter I) takes account of.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE HELMSMAN

The African helmsman who steers the boat is an "athletic black
belonging to some coast tribe" who dies from a spear wound
during the attack on the steamer.  He's a poor worker,
swaggering and undependable, and Marlow (who calls him a fool)
has to watch over him constantly.  His death is largely his own
fault, since he abandons his post to stand at the window and
shoot wildly at the attacking tribe.  "He had no restraint,"
Marlow comments, "no restraint--just like Kurtz" (Chapter II).
Nevertheless, Marlow clearly values him.  A subtle bond has
grown between them through working together (Marlow is always
thinking about the rewards of work), and he doesn't think
getting to Kurtz was worth the death of his helmsman.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE MANAGER'S UNCLE

The manager's uncle arrives at the Central Station while Marlow
is delayed there repairing his boat.  He's a short, fat man who
heads something called the Eldorado Exploring Expedition--a
group pretending to be interested in geography but really just
out to get rich.  Marlow compares them to burglars.  He also
overhears a conversation between the manager and his uncle in
which the uncle proves to be particularly bloodthirsty, urging
his nephew to exercise his authority and hang whomever he wants
to.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE BOILER-MAKER

Marlow's foreman is a mechanic at the Central Station, a
boiler-maker by trade.  His rough manners make him an object of
disdain to the pilgrims, but he appeals to Marlow because of his
capacity and enthusiasm for work.  He makes only a brief
appearance, just after Marlow's long talk with the brickmaker.
His simple bluntness is a relief after the brickmaker's
caginess, and his unrefined, working-class bearing forms an
effective contrast to the brickmaker's effete, upper-class
smugness.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  MARLOW'S AUNT

Marlow's aunt is based, at least in part, on Marguerite
Poradowska, who was related to Conrad by marriage.  (She was not
a true aunt, but he addressed her that way in his letters.) Like
Marlow's aunt, Poradowska lived in Brussels and intervened on
Conrad's behalf to secure him an appointment as captain of a
Congo steamer.

If Conrad was trying to depict Marguerite Poradowska
realistically, the portrait was not a very flattering one.  The
aunt has been swayed by all the "rot let loose in print and talk
just about that time," and she prattles about the high (and
false) ideals she's been hearing about--civilizing the ignorant
masses, and so forth--until finally Marlow has to remind her
that the Company is run for profit.  Her chatter prompts the
first of several passages on "how out of touch with truth women
are" (Chapter I)--a reflection that comes home during Marlow's
encounter with Kurtz's Intended at the end of the novel.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE NARRATOR

We learn very little about the actual narrator of the novel, the
man who, aboard the Nellie anchored at the mouth of the Thames,
hears Marlow spin his yarn and later reports it to us.  But we
can see that he has been affected by what he hears, as the
change in imagery from the beginning to the end of the book
indicates.  At the outset he's impressed by all the light on the
Thames, and he thinks about English nautical history in terms of
light--for instance, "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire."
By the end, his imagination is full of darkness.  If Marlow
intends his tale as a warning that we need to pay more heed to
the "darkness"--the incomprehensible, the opposite of
civilization and progress--then in the case of the narrator, at
least, he's made his point.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  SETTING

Although most of the action in Heart of Darkness is set in the
jungles of the African Congo, the tale itself is narrated by a
sailor aboard a pleasure boat at the mouth of the Thames River
outside London.  Both the time of day and the spot are
significant.  It's sunset; as the tale turns gloomier, images of
darkness get more and more pervasive.  The evening grows
gradually darker, so that by the time Marlow finishes, late in
the night, his listeners have literally been enveloped in
darkness.  The setting right outside London would put them next
to the great seat of civilization (for an English novelist, at
least)--a strategic place from which to hear a tale of the
wilderness.  In fact, for an English sailor the mouth of the
Thames would mark the point between the light of civilization
and the unknown ends of the earth.  But by the end Marlow has
made it clear that the "darkness" he is talking about has almost
as much to do with the city as with the jungle.

Marlow's adventure takes place in the Congo Free State, an area
that at the time was the personal property of Leopold II, king
of the Belgians.  There had been a lot of empty talk about
Leopold's philanthropic and civilizing activities in the Congo,
but by 1899, when Heart of Darkness first appeared, the grim
conditions that actually prevailed there and the grotesquely
inhumane treatment of the African natives were becoming widely
enough known to create an international scandal.  Conrad, who
served as skipper of a Congo steamer himself in 1890, knew the
true conditions, and much of the gruesome detail is drawn from
observation.  But he exaggerated a few points for literary
purposes.  Specifically, the Congo was already far more tamed by
Conrad's time than the novel suggests.  The river was dotted
with active trading stations, and the station that would have
been the equivalent of Kurtz's Inner Station had a number of
company agents, not just one.  Conrad's departures from the
reality serve to emphasize the isolation of his characters, and
thus to intensify the theme of solitude.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THEME

The darkness of the title is the major theme of the book, but
the meaning of that darkness is never clearly defined.  On the
whole it stands for the unknown and the unknowable; it
represents the opposite of the progress and enlightenment that
dominated the 19th century.  Not many years before, it had been
widely believed that science was eventually going to cure the
ills of the world; but by the end of the century a deeper
pessimism had taken hold, and the darkness is Conrad's image for
everything he most dreaded.  Science had turned out to be a
sham, at least as a route to human happiness--the world wasn't
getting any better.  Was the darkness something that was simply
a part of the universe, something that could never be defeated?
Or did it come from within human beings?  The "heart of
darkness" stands for many things--the interior of the jungle,
the Inner Station, Kurtz's own black heart, perhaps the heart of
every human being.

Conrad leaves the meanings of this darkness hazy on purpose.  As
the narrator tells us,--for Marlow "the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze" (Chapter
I).  He also calls the story "inconclusive." In other words, you
can't easily reduce the meaning to a couple of sentences.
Conrad doesn't declare--he hints and suggests.  This quality
sometimes makes it difficult to put your finger on exactly what
it is about a passage that disturbs or moves or excites you, and
it makes it difficult to explain the full meaning of certain
symbols--especially the darkness.  But it's exactly this quality
that makes the book so creepy and unsettling that it lingers in
the mind.

There are several running subthemes that you should note.
Foremost among these is the notion of work.  Whatever the
darkness is, the best way to fend it off, and to stay sane, is
by working.  Conrad doesn't pretend that work is enjoyable, but
it strengthens your character and makes you less likely to lose
your grip in difficult situations.  (One reason most of the
white characters in the novel are so unattractive is that they
don't do their work.) Another value he holds in esteem is
restraint.  Self-restraint takes determination, but it may save
you from the grim consequences of thoughtless action.  Conrad
shows us two unsettling examples of individuals who lack
restraint.  One is the black helmsman on Marlow's boat; his
inability to restrain himself leads to his death.  The other
example is Mr.  Kurtz, whose lack of restraint is to a large
degree the subject of the plot.

Another running theme could be called the unreliability of high
ideals, or simply of words.  (This is surprising from a novelist
who's so verbose himself.) Conrad and his alter ego, Marlow,
don't trust words.  Actions are what you have to judge people
by:  actions can't lie, but words can.  A related topic is the
theme of illusions, and of delusions.  Conrad believes that some
illusions are necessary, especially for his women characters.
But how necessary?  And is a lie excusable, or even commendable,
when it supports such an illusion?

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  STYLE

Since Marlow's tale is told aloud, Conrad makes his prose
resemble a speaking voice.  Thus we get pauses, hesitations,
repetitions, digressions--all of which we normally associate
with a speaker, not a writer.  You get the sense of Marlow being
at times completely absorbed by his memories, at others becoming
abstracted and letting his mind wander; of his constantly trying
to understand the meaning of his own tale.  He is remarkably
(sometimes painfully) wordy, testing a formulation, then backing
off and trying another, until he's reached one he feels
satisfied with.  It's almost as if he wants to trap his worst
memories in a soft cocoon of words.

Conrad's so-called impressionist method lets us experience
Marlow's sensations along with him.  The author mounts detail on
detail before finally putting them all together to find their
significance.  For example, at the Inner Station where Marlow
has gone to retrieve Kurtz, he spies six posts with ornamental
balls on top and assumes that they must be the remainder of some
kind of fence.  Later, looking through a telescope, the balls
come into focus and he realizes they're human heads.  We
experience his misperception as well as his sudden revelation,
and even the revelation comes in stages:  first his
surprise--"its first result was to make me throw my head back as
if before a blow" (Chapter III)--and then his deduction.  So we
take part in the mental process.  This kind of immediacy, this
emphasis on sensation, makes the jungle seem very real, and it's
particularly effective during such episodes as the attack on the
steamer.

But it has a further implication.  The emphasis is on what you
can know with your senses--these facts are reliable.  Marlow, of
course, is constantly examining his sensations to find the
meaning in them, expressing opinions and doubts, but seldom
coming to firm conclusions.  Marlow's experiences, as the
narrator tells us (Chapter I), are "inconclusive," and for such
inconclusiveness Conrad's impressionist style is appropriate.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  POINT OF VIEW

Marlow is clearly Conrad's alter ego; his opinions don't differ
significantly from what we know about the author's own.  But
Marlow has tremendous importance as a literary device.  By using
an actual speaking sailor to tell the story, Conrad goes just
about as far away as you can get from the typical 19th-century
novel's omniscient narrator--the all-knowing voice of an
impersonal author who told you not only what happened to the
characters but also what went on in their minds.  We're never
allowed to know more than Marlow himself, and Marlow knows only
what he perceives through his senses.  Thus, we're never
directly told what motivated, say, the manager or Kurtz.
Instead, we get Marlow's speculations on what their motivations
might have been.

What's most unusual about the point of view in Heart of Darkness
isn't the use of Marlow as narrator, but that his tale is framed
by the narration of another, nameless observer.  As a result,
Marlow's whole story appears somewhat cumbersomely enclosed in
quotation marks.  Why couldn't Conrad just make Marlow the
primary narrator and drop the nameless voice at the beginning
and the end?

One reason is that by having Marlow in front of us on the
cruising yawl Nellie, we feel the immediacy of his speaking
voice, we get the actual sensation of a crusty sailor spinning a
yarn before us.  If Conrad had written the whole novel in the
first person, dispensing with the primary narrator, he'd have
ended up with a more "writerly" book, in which Marlow's
hesitations and digressions--which are such an important element
in the style--would have no place.  We would also miss the
feeling that Marlow was working out the meaning of his tale as
he went along, and that we were a part of that process.  A
writer, unlike a talker, usually has things worked out
beforehand.

The meaning of the novel lies not only in what happened in
Africa, but also in Marlow's conviction that he has to tell
others about these events as a kind of warning.  The
representative Victorians aboard the Nellie need to be told
about the threat of the darkness, the threat to progress and
enlightenment, because for the most part the Victorian world
hadn't acknowledged that threat.  By putting his audience,
especially the primary narrator, on the deck of the Nellie with
Marlow, Conrad emphasizes this warning aspect of Marlow's
tale--and its effect on his listeners.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  FORM AND STRUCTURE

Heart of Darkness is structured as a journey of discovery, both
externally in the jungle, and internally in Marlow's own mind.
The deeper he penetrates into the heart of the jungle, the
deeper he delves within himself; by the climax, when Kurtz has
been revealed for the disgrace he is, Marlow has also learned
something about himself.  And he returns to civilization with
this new knowledge.

Formally, Heart of Darkness looks forward to many of the
developments of the modern novel--most notably the fracturing of
time.  Marlow doesn't tell his tale straight through from
beginning to end; he'll skip from an early event to a late event
and back again.  Thus, we get several pages about
Kurtz--Marlow's impressions and evaluation of his
behavior--close to the end of Chapter II, but Kurtz himself
doesn't appear on the scene until some way into Chapter III.
Nor would a typical 19th-century narrator interrupt a buildup of
suspense like the depiction of the boat waiting to be attacked
in the fog with a lengthy digression on cannibalism and
self-restraint.  But Marlow does.  He's describing the fog and
the fright of the white pilgrims on board, which leads him to
recall the reactions of the black Africans on board, and
suddenly he's off on a tangent about cannibalism that brings the
development of the action to a complete halt.  In a more
traditional novel this passage would have been reserved for a
more appropriate place, for example, when the author first
introduced the cannibals.  But Marlow imparts his thoughts as
they occur to him.  Conrad was trying to find a form that more
closely followed the contours of human thought--a less
artificial form than the traditional novel.  (Later novelists
notably James Joyce and William Faulkner, took these experiments
with fractured time and space much further.) Hence the forward
and backward leaps, the interruptions, the thoughts left
dangling.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE STORY

Conrad divided Heart of Darkness into three longish chapters.
To make discussion easier, they can be subdivided as follows:

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  CHAPTER I

1.  Prologue:  Marlow Begins His Tale.

2.  The Sepulchral City.  The Company.

3.  Africa.  The Outer Station.

4.  The Trek.  The Central Station.

5.  The Brickmaker.

6.  The Boiler-maker.  The Eldorado Expedition.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  CHAPTER II

1.  The Manager and His Uncle.

2.  The Journey Upriver.

3.  The Message.  The Fog.  Cannibals.

4.  The Attack.

5.  Kurtz.

6.  The Inner Station.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  CHAPTER III

1.  The Russian's Story.

2.  Kurtz.  His Mistress.  Departure of the Russian.

3.  Kurtz's Escape.  Departure.

4.  Kurtz's Death.

5.  Marlow's illness and Return.

6.  The Lie.

7.  Epilogue.

Be sure to note that these subdivisions aren't Conrad's.  They
are used in this guide only to make the novel easier to analyze
and discuss.

Quotations cited can usually be found in the subdivision being
discussed.  When a quotation is from a subdivision other than
the one under discussion, it will be identified this way:
"(III, 5)", meaning Chapter III, subdivision 5--the subdivision
titled "Marlow's Illness and Return."

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  PROLOGUE:  MARLOW BEGINS HIS
TALE

Five Englishmen are enjoying themselves one pleasant afternoon
aboard a sailboat close to the mouth of the Thames River outside
London.  Since there isn't much wind, they're stranded when the
tide turns ("The flood had made"); all they can do is drop
anchor and wait several hours until the tide shifts again.  The
men on board are our nameless narrator; a weathered sailor by
the name of Marlow; and three typical representatives of
Victorian professional society:  a lawyer, an accountant, and a
director of companies (who owns the boat).

Sunset:  the light on the Thames is brilliant.  Our narrator
patriotically recalls the great British sailors, from the
16th-century Sir Francis Drake to the 19th-century Sir John
Franklin, who navigated this river in times past.  His thoughts
are full of satisfaction and nationalistic smugness:  these
heroes, he reflects, are "bearers of a spark from the sacred
fire" of English civilization.

NOTE:  The narrator exhibits an optimism that was typical of the
Victorians:  he thinks civilization (particularly British
civilization) is going to make the world better and better.  It
was widely believed in the 19th century that scientific and
technological progress would eventually turn the world into a
paradise.  We can sense something of this attitude in our
narrator's enthusiastic tone, and it's probable that his three
professional companions share his viewpoint.  We never learn
much about these men individually, but Conrad may have chosen
them to represent the Victorian bourgeoisie--that optimistic
class to whom Marlow's warning tale will be largely addressed.
These people believed smugly that enlightenment would overcome
backwardness; in terms of images, that light (as in
"enlightenment") was bound to conquer the darkness of ignorance
and superstition.

Notice how our primary narrator's descriptions sparkle with
images of light:  he believes, too confidently, in the forces of
progress.  The cautionary tale he's about to hear about a
journey into the "heart of darkness" is going to dampen some of
this easy confidence.

NOTE:  Be sure to pay particular attention at this point to the
images of light on the river, because they'll form an important
contrast to the book's closing images of darkness.  In fact,
this contrast will make up the most pervasive image pattern in
the novel.  You should keep an eye out for the way Conrad uses
light and dark, or white and black, for much of the novel's
meaning can be deduced from these image patterns.

The men are sitting in silence when, out of the blue, Marlow
observes that the very civilized land around them was once a
primitive wilderness, "one of the dark places of the earth." He
imagines how ominously ancient England must have struck its
Roman conquerors.  The savage land must have seemed horrible to
any civilized Roman commander.  Marlow describes the way the
"fascination of the abomination" of a place like that might go
to work unhinging the mind of such a man.  Although Marlow seems
to be rambling, Conrad is actually foreshadowing what is going
to happen later in the book.  The tale Marlow tells will concern
a modern-day colonizer, Mr.  Kurtz, who succumbs to "the
fascination of the abomination" in the wilderness of Africa.
The phrase is only vaguely ominous now, but its meaning will
grow clearer as Marlow develops his tale.

Nevertheless, Marlow continues, there wasn't much to admire in
these Roman conquerors.  They were really just glorified robbers
out to get whatever they could grab.  In fact, the conquest of
the earth is an ugly thing--greed carried out on a large scale.
But, he adds, it can be redeemed by a "devotion to efficiency"
and by an idea--the idea of progress.  Conquest for plunder is
one thing, but conquest for the purpose of civilizing the world
is something else entirely.

Again, through this seemingly casual monologue Conrad is
introducing another major theme:  the brutality of colonization.
But observe that as scathing as Marlow is about brute conquest,
he makes an exception for those conquerors who spread progress
and enlightenment around the globe, which was exactly how the
British saw themselves.

NOTE:  Conrad probably put these positive sentiments about
colonization into Marlow's mouth in order to pacify his British
audience.  Britain at that time, after all, was one of the great
imperial powers, and British readers wouldn't have taken kindly
to an out-and-out attack on the morality of colonization.

Marlow's reflections remind him of an incident in his own past,
and the narrator realizes that he's about to launch into a
tale.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE SEPULCHRAL CITY.  THE
COMPANY

As a boy, Marlow tells the group, he used to be fascinated by
maps, especially the blank spaces--places that hadn't yet been
explored.  (This was true of the young Conrad, too.) At the
start of his tale he's a young sailor just back from a stint in
the Orient, and looking without much success for work.  One day
in a shop window he sees a map of the African Congo--one of the
blank spaces of his childhood maps and hardly more explored now.
The trading companies on the Congo River, he realizes, must use
steamboats; it dawns on him that he could get a commission as
skipper of one of them.

Since the Congo Free State was a possession of the king of the
Belgians, Leopold II, Marlow asks an influential aunt who lives
in Brussels to try to help him get a post.  She succeeds; a new
captain is needed to replace the skipper of one of the Company's
boats, who was killed in a scuffle with the Africans.

NOTE:  From 1885 to 1908 the Congo Free State, a territory of
almost one million square miles, was the personal property of
Leopold II.  Leopold spoke in the most exalted terms about
civilizing the Africans, yet the exploitation, massacre, and
enslavement of the natives got worse with each year of his
reign.  Heart of Darkness was one of the early expressions of a
revulsion that eventually grew to international proportions.

Marlow's nickname for Brussels, "the sepulchral city," comes
from the words of Jesus (Matthew 23:27-28):  "Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  for ye are like unto whited
sepulchres [tombs], which indeed appear beautiful outward, but
are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within
ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." This would make a good
description of the Belgians' hypocrisy toward the Congo:  they
claimed to be guiding and helping the Africans, when in fact
they were enslaving and slaughtering them in record numbers.

NOTE:  Marlow never calls Brussels by name, nor, for that
matter, does he name the Company, the Congo, the Congo River, or
most of the characters in the novel.  Conrad once wrote that
explicitness "is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work,
robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion."
Because unnamed cities and characters seem more general, they
can carry a heavier burden of symbolic meaning--and Conrad
wanted to load his novel with symbolic meaning.

Marlow visits the offices of "the Company" that has a large
concession in the Congo.  They strike him as ominous,
disturbing.  Two women sit in the outer office, dressed in black
and knitting black wool.  Marlow fancifully imagines greeting
them with the cry of the Roman gladiators.  The phrase, in
Latin, translates as "Hail!  We who are about to die salute
you!"--which wouldn't be altogether wrong, since more than half
of those who traveled to the Congo never came back.  After being
introduced briefly to the director of the Company, Marlow is
accompanied by a clerk to his medical examination.  The clerk
prattles about the glories of the Company's business, but when
Marlow asks him why he himself hasn't traveled to Africa, he
suddenly turns cold and intimates that only a fool would go
there.  The doctor isn't very reassuring, either.  He keeps
hinting (though he never says so directly) that if Marlow goes
to Africa he may go mad, and he offers the not-very-helpful
advice that he should try to "avoid irritation" there.  Madness
is indeed a terror Marlow will face--and nearly succumb to--in
the jungle, but as yet he doesn't know why, though he has an
inkling that something isn't right.

NOTE:  Conrad has created an ominous atmosphere before Marlow
even leaves for Africa.  The Congo River on a map looks like a
snake to Marlow, and you don't have to recall that ever since
the story of what happened in the Garden of Eden the snake has
been a symbol of evil to sense the reason that this image bodes
ill for Marlow.  He comes right out and says that "it fascinated
me as a snake would a bird--a silly little bird." Will it, in
some sense, swallow him up, make him its own?  Likewise, the
Company's offices are gloomy and strange, and its officials
behave as if they were all in on some evil secret.  And in a
sense they are:  the secret is the horrible brutality of the
Belgians to the black Africans.  Marlow isn't naive, but he
isn't prepared for the terrible spectacle that will confront him
when he gets to the Congo.

Before leaving "the sepulchral city" of Brussels, Marlow pays a
visit to the aunt who helped get him his commission.  Talking to
her he realizes that she must have recommended him not merely as
a good sailor but as an exceptional and gifted man as well.
He's embarrassed not only because of his natural modesty but,
more to the point, because he perceives that he's expected to
travel down as an "emissary of light"--an apostle of
civilization in the jungle, spreading enlightenment among the
ignorant millions.  All this rhetoric--the "rot let loose in
print and talk just about that time," he calls it--strikes him
as hypocritical, and he's disturbed to hear his aunt spouting
it.

NOTE:  This discrepancy between the myths and the facts--the
unreliability of words--will form one of Conrad's major
themes.

Marlow is unable to make his aunt see the truth.  Women, he
reflects condescendingly, live in a world of beautiful
illusions.  Marlow's opinions about women strike us as offensive
today, but they wouldn't have seemed unusual to Conrad's
Victorian audience, which regarded its women--at least its
wealthy ones--as fragile creatures who needed to be protected
from life and work.  (Work, we'll find, is one of Marlow's
highest values.) In any case, the passage is an important one;
you should keep it in mind when you reach the last scene of
Marlow's tale, in which he confronts another woman, a woman
whose illusions won't seem so beautiful.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  AFRICA.  THE OUTER STATION

From the beginning, Africa creates an unsettling impression for
Marlow.  For example, he watches a battleship firing its guns at
the overgrown bank; the ship seems tiny and helpless against the
immensity of the jungle, almost as if it were attempting to fire
not at men but at a continent.  The image gives us a sense of
the littleness of human beings against the immensity of the
jungle; it suggests that conquering the jungle is a task so
tremendous that it's almost hopeless.

The sailors on board that French ship, Marlow learns, are dying
at the rate of three a day.  Disease was then the greatest
hazard one faced in Africa.  Conrad, too, came down with
dysentery during his journey to the Congo; and Marlow himself
will face a bout of fever before the end.

A Swedish captain takes Marlow from the mouth of the Congo
upstream to the Company's Outer Station.  Talking to Marlow the
Englishman, this captain seems contemptuous of the Belgian
officials there.  He, too, seems to suggest that the jungle is a
stronger opponent than most Europeans think; and he hints that
it can drive you mad, mentioning another man he recently brought
upriver, who ended up hanging himself.

When Marlow reaches the Outer Station he's appalled by
practically everything he finds there.  The place is a nightmare
of disorder and inefficiency.  Machinery is rusting in the
grass; a shipment of imported pipes lies smashed at the bottom
of a ravine.  A cliff wall is being dynamited to make way for a
railroad (even though it doesn't seem to Marlow to be in the way
of anything) but the explosion seems to have no effect at all on
the rock.  Again, the jungle--so romantic and unthreatening when
Marlow envisioned it back in London--now seems so immense, so
powerful, that the white man's puny efforts to bring order into
it look pathetic.

Marlow hears a clinking noise and he turns to see a chain gang
of raggedy, emaciated blacks, iron collars around their necks.
This gruesome vision disgusts Marlow, and he moves aside to let
them get ahead and out of sight.

NOTE:  These men are our first view of the brutality that will
form so much a part of Marlow's Congo experience:  they are
criminals according to a set of European laws that they could
never hope to understand.  They're followed by a self-important
African guard who doesn't understand any better.

But he's about to witness something even more terrible.  He
steps down into a gloomy grove and discovers a group of dying
Africans.  These men aren't legally criminals or slaves either,
though they're bound by "time contracts" to work for set
periods.  They certainly don't understand contracts and probably
don't even understand time.  These victims are workers who have
become diseased and worn out, maybe because of the unfamiliar
food or the unpleasant surroundings far from their homes.  So
they're allowed to crawl away and die.  They're a perfect, vivid
emblem of what the white man has done to the black man in
Africa.  For his part, Marlow is horrified.  Glancing down, he
sees a face near his hand; he reaches nervously into his pocket
and comes out with a cracker.  Marlow's description of his
gesture is typically self-effacing; he isn't given to
celebrating his own virtues.  As a gesture of compassion, his
action may not seem like much, but it surpasses anything we're
going to see from the other white men in the novel, who don't
even seem to perceive the Africans as human.

Marlow has had enough.  He climbs uphill to the Station's main
buildings.  Soon he encounters a character who seems to embody
the very opposite of all the disorder, ugliness, and futility
he's seen so far.  The man is wearing snowy white trousers, a
light jacket, and polished boots; he has carefully brushed and
parted his hair and he's holding a parasol to protect his skin
from the sun.  He turns out to be the Company's' chief
accountant.  Before long Marlow has a chance to observe him at
his job, and he's impressed with the precision and neatness with
which he manages his paperwork, just as he's impressed with the
appearance that he manages to keep up in the middle of such
confusion.  He's the only example we've seen of the "devotion to
efficiency" that Marlow said (I, 1) was the only excuse for
colonization.

But the chief accountant is so fanatically devoted to efficiency
in the form of neatness and precision that it becomes hard to
admire or even like him.  When one of the Company's agents is
brought into his office to lie out of the sun, he shows no
interest or sympathy, though the agent is feverish, delirious,
and apparently at death's door.  In fact, he complains that the
man's groans make it difficult for him to concentrate on his
work.  When the Africans outside raise a shout about something,
he tells Marlow that the distractions they create have made him
"hate them to the death." The chief accountant understands the
values of the numbers in his ledger books better than he
understands the value of a life.  If he exhibits virtues of
orderliness that most of the Belgian colonizers utterly lack, he
also shares a common failing with them:  a lack of compassion,
of feeling, of respect for life.

One day the accountant mentions a certain Mr.  Kurtz, whom
Marlow will no doubt meet upriver.  When Marlow inquires about
this Kurtz, the accountant tells him that he's a remarkable
agent of the Company.  From his post at the Inner Station (about
one thousand miles away, we later learn), he's managed to send
back more ivory than all the other agents combined.  Apparently
he has a high reputation in the Company's European office; the
accountant is sure that he's going to be promoted into the
administration soon, and that "he will go far, very far."

NOTE:  This is the first mention of a character who will become
pivotal to Marlow's tale.  At this point he's only the vague
form of an efficient agent.  But as Marlow gets closer and
closer to the Inner Station, Mr.  Kurtz will sharpen into grim
focus.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE TREK.  THE CENTRAL STATION

To get from the Outer Station to the Company's Central Station
200 miles inland, Marlow has to make a difficult overland trek.
He's accompanied by a fat and sickly trader and a crew of 60
black carriers.

The path they travel is strangely deserted.  Of course, Marlow
reflects, if the English countryside suddenly filled with a lot
of mysterious blacks armed with fearful weapons, who went around
capturing the locals and forcing them to carry heavy loads, it
would probably clear out pretty quickly, too.  It's basically
just a comic observation; but, again, it shows an empathy in
Marlow that the other whites don't share.  Even though his tone
is flip, he makes a connection between the lives of Africans and
the lives of his compatriots that would never occur to his white
colleagues.

The party encounters a white officer who claims his job is
keeping the road up (though, as far as Marlow can see, there
isn't any road); nearby, they find the corpse of an African, a
bullet hole through his forehead.  The trip turns even more
unpleasant when the fat white trader becomes ill.  Unfit for the
hardships of such a hike, he's constantly fainting.  (When
Marlow asks him why he ever came to Africa he replies
scornfully, "To make money, of course"--one more greedy white.)
Eventually he comes down with a fever and has to be carried in a
hammock.  He's so fat that some of the crew sneak away at night
to get out of having to lug him.  One evening Marlow lectures
them sternly, and the next day he sends the hammock with its
carriers off in front.  An hour later he finds it overturned in
a bush, its furious cargo groaning and demanding somebody's
death.  Marlow remembers a remark of the doctor in Brussels (the
one who told him to avoid irritation, which he is not managing
to do) that it would be interesting to watch the "mental
changes" of individuals who went to Africa.  "I felt I was
becoming scientifically interesting," Marlow says drily.  Again,
the tone is slightly comic, but the spectre of madness had
already begun to show itself--faintly.

After 15 days they finally reach the Central Station, which
turns out to be just as disorganized and disorderly as the Outer
Station.  One of the agents immediately tells Marlow that the
steamship he was supposed to command is lying at the bottom of
the river.

Before he has any time to rest from his 20-mile walk that
morning, Marlow is ushered in for an interview with the
station's manager.  He doesn't find much to like or admire in
the man.  The manager is a "common trader," common in learning,
common in intelligence, and with no talent for administration
and no ability to inspire the men he commands.  In fact, his
only real talent seems to be for staying healthy--no small
advantage in country where whites are constantly coming down
with deadly fevers.

As soon as Marlow walks in, the manager begins chattering about
the wreck.  You may realize only in retrospect how nervously he
behaves, and it should make you suspicious.  (Marlow isn't
suspicious, though--yet.) The manager tells him he tried to set
out two days before with a volunteer skipper, and almost
immediately they tore out the bottom of the boat on stones.  It
sank at once.  They just couldn't wait for Marlow any longer,
the manager claims, they'd heard that an important station
upriver was in danger and that its chief, Mr.  Kurtz, was ill.
Marlow tells him he's already heard of Kurtz.  The manager is
interested to learn that they speak of him at the Outer Station,
and he quickly and rather nervously assures Marlow that Kurtz is
their best agent, an important and exceptional man.  He protests
too much, as if he thinks Marlow has some reason to suspect him
of lying.

Marlow, telling the story later, hints that the manager may not
have been exactly honest about the wreck.  "Certainly," Marlow
says, "the affair was too stupid--when I think of it--to be
altogether natural." The manager fidgets suspiciously, as if he
had something to hide.  We're going to find out later that he
really hates Kurtz.  Since he knows Kurtz is ill, there's good
reason for us to suspect that he was willing to sabotage the
steamboat in order to keep from having to save him.  But suspect
is all we can do; Marlow gives us no final evidence on the
charge.

Note:  Conrad didn't shape the incidents in the novel for
literary and symbolic purposes alone.  He was telling an exotic
adventure story, and early readers were especially fascinated by
the authentic descriptions of African ordeals.  Conrad later
wrote, in his author's note to the volume in which Heart of
Darkness was published, that the novel was "authentic in
fundamentals" and that it represented "experience pushed a
little (and only a very little) beyond the actual facts of the
case." You might be surprised at the number of incidents that
Conrad didn't invent.  The strenuous trek; the corpse of the
shot native; the sickly companion; the carriers' resentment at
having to haul him, and the speech to them; the wrecked
steamer--all these details come straight from the pages of
Conrad's Congo diary.

The manager, too, is drawn from life.  he's based on the figure
of Camille Delcommune, a local manager and official of the
outfit for which Conrad worked in the Congo.  For some reason
Delcommune and Conrad took an intense dislike to each other, so
Conrad was probably getting even when he drew the manager as
such a repellent nothing of a character.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE BRICKMAKER

To Marlow's disgust the other agents at the Central Station seem
to spend most of their time either backbiting or wandering
aimlessly around in the sun.  With the long staffs they always
carry, they remind him of "a lot of faithless pilgrims." A
pilgrim is a traveler to a holy place; why should Marlow pick
this word for the unholy agents?  He supplies the answer
himself:  "The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was
sighed.  You would think they were praying to it."

One evening a fire breaks out in one of the storage sheds, and
the "pilgrims" run around idiotically trying to put it out.
Marlow watches one of them attempt to fill a bucket that has a
hole in the bottom--another moment of comedy, and another
example of the gross incompetence that reigns at the Central
Station.  Meanwhile, he falls into conversation with one of the
agents, a young aristocrat who's a flunky to the manager and a
snob to the other agents.  On their side, they think he's the
manager's spy.  How could these men ever conquer the wilderness
when they can't even conquer their petty jealousies?

This man is supposed to be a brickmaker but, true to the
inefficiency of the place, he hasn't managed to make any bricks
because he lacks some material or other that he needs.  The
young man invites Marlow to his room, and as the two talk Marlow
slowly realizes that the brickmaker is pumping him for
information--even though he has no idea what useful information
he might possess.  The brickmaker drops a lot of hints about
Marlow's connections in Brussels, and he gets more and more
annoyed because he thinks Marlow is hiding something from him.

Marlow is struck by a painting in the room--a blindfolded woman
carrying a lighted torch--and the brickmaker tells him that it
was done by Mr.  Kurtz when he was at the Central Station more
than a year ago.

NOTE:  The painting is obviously symbolic.  The lighted torch
reminds us of the primary narrator's description near the
beginning of the novel of heroic British navigators:  "bearing
the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within
the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" (I, 1).  The
woman is carrying what must be the torch of enlightenment amid,
we may surmise, the darkness of ignorance.  But why should this
emblem of colonization be blindfolded?  Shouldn't colonizers
enter the wilderness with their eyes open?  (Obviously, from
Marlow's experience so far, many of them haven't.) And why isn't
the torch illuminating the "sombre--almost black" background as
knowledge is supposed to enlighten ignorance?  And finally, why
does the torchlight have a "sinister" rather than an agreeable
effect on the woman's face?  Conrad doesn't place a heavy
emphasis on this symbolic painting, and neither should we.  But
if you think about it you might find it a little disquieting.
Does it mean that the forces of light have no hope of
illuminating the darkness?  Or is its significance more
particular, a glimpse into the mind of Kurtz?  And if Kurtz is
the bearer of light (as, we'll see, he claims to be), is there
something "sinister" about him?

Marlow asks for more information about Kurtz.  The brickmaker
tells him that Kurtz is "an emissary of pity and science and
progress"--i.e., of light--one of the brilliant new breed who
have come to Africa not just for profit, but with a higher
mission to civilize the Africans.  Kurtz is a special being, as
Marlow ought to know.  Marlow doesn't know why he ought to know,
but the brickmaker won't let him get a word in.  Right now, he
continues, Kurtz is chief of the best station; next year he'll
probably be assistant manager, and who knows how high he'll
climb after that.  He thinks Marlow ought to know because Marlow
too is one of "the new gang--the gang of virtue." Suddenly
everything becomes clear.  Marlow recalls his aunt's clap-trap
about his being an "emissary of light" in the jungle, and he
remembers the exceptional terms of praise she had used to
recommend him.  Word has somehow reached this young man, and he
must think that Marlow is terribly influential with the
Company's European office, and that he's in league with Kurtz.
The brickmaker had planned to become assistant manager under the
current manager; the arrival of the awesomely impressive Kurtz
must have thrown a wrench into the plans of both men.

The brickmaker's rather confusing jabber about the "gang of
virtue" refers to a conflict between King Leopold, who had a
monopoly on trade in the Congo, and the private companies to
which he had granted concessions, one of which is the so-called
Company Marlow is working for.  These companies found a
propaganda advantage in allying themselves with the reformers
who were genuinely interested in improving conditions for the
Africans--they could claim to be doing some good beyond lining
their own pockets.  It was only a pose, but since it was the
Company's official line, plenty of agents took it seriously,
including Kurtz.  Thus, the "gang of virtue" is the new wave of
Company men professing the new ideals, and they threaten the
entrenched positions of the old-school bureaucrats like the
manager and the brickmaker.

So far Kurtz hasn't been much more than a word to Marlow.  And
yet now Marlow does something for this unknown quantity that's
against all his principles, something that makes him feel
miserable and sick:  he lies for him.  It isn't a gross lie, he
just keeps quiet and lets the brickmaker go on thinking that he
has a lot of influence in Europe.  He can't even really explain
the reason he does it, beyond saying that he had the impression
that his lie would be helpful to Kurtz (apparently by keeping
the brickmaker--and the manager--intimidated).  Why should he be
loyal to Kurtz?  Because at this point he's heard nothing but
praise for his efficiency and his high ideals, assets that are
rare (to put it mildly) in the whites he's met so far.

NOTE:  It's ironic that Marlow should do something counter to
his principles in order to protect a man whose principles he
admires, or thinks he admires.  Nor is this the last time that
Marlow, the hater of lies, is going to lie for Kurtz.  He's
destined, like it or not, to remain loyal to Kurtz, even after
he learns more than he ever wanted to know about Kurtz and what
Kurtz has turned into out there in the jungle.

The two men go outside, and the brickmaker becomes even oilier,
calling Kurtz a "universal genius" and pitching himself as the
kind of intelligent man who could be useful to him.  He knows
that Marlow is going to see Kurtz before he will, and he wants
Marlow to put in a good word for him.  He makes excuses for not
making bricks, and for the menial secretarial work he performs
for the manager:  after all, it's only sensible to seek the
confidence of your superiors.  The man is obviously a shameless
bootlicker who will try to curry favor with anybody he thinks
can help him get ahead.

Marlow lets him run on for a while, but finally he tells him
that what he really wants are rivets for repairing the
steamboat.  He hasn't been able to get any himself, but the
brickmaker, he intimates, could get them for him if he set his
mind to it.  "My dear sir," the young man replies, "I write from
dictation"--meaning that he's just a secretary, that only the
manager has any real power to do favors for Marlow.  Marlow
insists that he could get them if he wanted.  Offended, the
brickmaker turns very cold and even, in a slimy way, menacing.
He mentions a hippo that seems to have a charmed life, even
though the pilgrims have emptied their rifles into it.  But that
can be said only about jungle beasts.  "No man--you apprehend
me?--no man here bears a charmed life," he tells Marlow, and on
that outrageously (and unconvincingly) threatening note, this
pathetically ineffectual man departs with a curt goodnight.

NOTE:  Conrad has a particular metaphor for the spiritual
emptiness of the white men in Africa, and it gains power every
time he uses it.  "Perhaps there was nothing within him," Marlow
says of the manager (I, 4); and as he's talking to the
brickmaker he observes, "It seemed to me that if I tried I could
poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside
but a little loose dirt, maybe." Later we will find out that
Kurtz, too, "was hollow at the core" (III, 1).  No wonder that
T.  S.  Eliot called his 1925 poem on the subject of spiritual
desolation "The Hollow Men," and chose an epigraph for it from
Heart of Darkness.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE BOILER-MAKER.  THE ELDORADO
EXPEDITION

Even though the brickmaker protested that he was powerless to
help, Marlow thinks his request for rivets may have done some
good.  After all, the brickmaker still thinks that Marlow is an
influential man, and he does want to get into his good graces.
Marlow returns to the boat, which he's taken to staying with day
and night (he even sleeps on it).  There he talks with his
foreman, a boiler-maker by trade.  The foreman is a rough,
working-class mechanic, bald and bearded.  He's disdained by the
pilgrims, but Marlow admires him--after all, he works, as
opposed to the pilgrims, who don't do much of anything.

NOTE:  Marlow's comments on the subject of work would have
struck a responsive chord in his Victorian audience.  Work was
one of the highest Victorian values, and it's one of his own.
He tells us that it's only through work that you find your own
reality, that you learn what has real meaning for yourself.  The
subject of work is a running theme in the novel.  Marlow touched
on it during his opening monologue when he maintained that the
"devotion to efficiency" is part of what redeems the excesses of
colonization (I, 1).  Later, on the river, Marlow's devotion to
work (or to his boat, which comes to the same thing) will help
to hold him back from the edge of madness.

When Marlow tells the boiler-maker that he may have succeeded in
getting their rivets, the two men get as excited as children.
They dance a jig on the deck of the boat and raise a tremendous
clatter, which the jungle answers with its huge, unnerving
silence.  Marlow predicts that the rivets will come in three
weeks.

But they don't come.  What comes instead is a party of
explorers--Marlow calls them "an invasion, an infliction"--named
the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and led by the manager's
uncle.  Eldorado was a mythical land of riches in South America.
The Spanish conquistadors attempted to find it, and when they
failed they ravaged the continent, leaving behind them a trail
of conquest and misery.  So "Eldorado" is the right name for the
expedition:  to Marlow, its members are just as disgusting and
greedy as the other whites he's encountered so far.  They've
come to Africa "to tear the treasure out of the bowels of the
land," and this desire to get rich, Marlow comments, "had no
more moral purpose at the back of it than is in burglars
breaking into a safe."

NOTE:  The first chapter ends here (with another brief mention
of the mysterious Kurtz), but the chapter breaks aren't really
very significant.  Heart of Darkness first ran in three
installments in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (February, March,
April 1899), so Conrad (or the editors) divided it into three
roughly equal parts for serialization.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE MANAGER AND HIS UNCLE

One evening as Marlow lies snoozing on the deck of his steamer,
he's awakened by a conversation.  The manager and his uncle are
talking beside the boat; they don't realize Marlow's sleeping on
top of it.

Conrad was trying here to capture the feel of a half-heard
conversation.  For that reason, you may find their talk a little
hard to follow, especially at first.  But it helps to know that
the two men are talking about Kurtz.  The manager, it appears,
feels just as threatened by Kurtz as the brickmaker did:  "Look
at the influence that man must have," he tells his uncle.  "Is
it not frightful?" (The manager and the brickmaker are eager to
attribute as much of their rival's success as they can to
"influence"; it's easier to admit that he's more influential
than that he's more talented than they are.) The uncle, in his
turn, suggests callously that the climate may take care of the
problem--with a little luck, Kurtz could die out there alone at
the Inner Station.  (We know already that he's rumored to be
ill.) The manager is also irked about an insolent note Kurtz
sent him.  But Kurtz keeps sending back ivory, and lots of it,
which impresses Company higher-ups, though it infuriates the
manager.

Some months ago, we learn, Kurtz began his return trip on the
river, with a clerk and a huge shipment of ivory.  But 300 miles
along the way he decided, for some reason, to turn back.  The
clerk, who brought the ivory the rest of the way to the Central
Station, reported that Kurtz had been seriously ill and that
he'd "recovered imperfectly." What could possibly have caused a
sick man to return to a lonely outpost where there are no other
civilized whites?  Actually, Kurtz isn't the only white man at
the station.  We learn by putting together bits and pieces of
the manager's talk that some sort of wandering trader is out
there, too.  The presence of a non-Company trader angers the
manager still further:  he calls him "unfair competition" and
declares that he ought to be hanged.  The blood-thirsty uncle
immediately agrees that the scoundrel should be hanged:
"Anything--anything can be done in this country," he tells his
nephew, meaning that out here in the wilderness the manager's
word is law.

The manager goes on ranting about Kurtz.  He's especially galled
by the ideals Kurtz was always spouting when he was at the
Central Station.  "Each station," Kurtz had said, sounding very
much like the "emissary of pity and science and progress" the
brickmaker had called him (I, 5), "should be like a beacon"
(note the image of light) "on the road toward better things, a
centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving,
instructing." This prompts the manager to comment, "That ass!"
to which he adds bitterly, "And he wants to be manager!" No
wonder he feels threatened.

NOTE:  What have we learned about Kurtz so far?  Little by
little we're getting hints that all isn't right with him.  Since
we know that he's ill and probably in need of medication, it's
hard to explain why he would return to his lonely outpost.
We've been told twice now--by the brickmaker and by the
manager--that he's a man of the highest moral ideals; but we
also know that he's living in a land with "no external checks"
(I, 4), no laws, a land where, as the uncle declares, "anything
can be done" if you have the authority of the gun.  The question
is:  alone in the jungle, has Kurtz been able to stay loyal to
his ideals?

The manager's own health has been "like a charm," but most of
the agents who come to Africa, he says, sicken and die more
quickly than he can send them out of the country.  "Ah, my boy,"
the uncle reassures him once again, the jungle will take care of
Kurtz.  "Trust to this," he tells his nephew, and he points to
the foreboding land--"to the lurking death, to the hidden evil,
to the profound darkness of its heart....  The high stillness
confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting
for the passing away of a fantastic invasion."

NOTE:  Conrad invests the jungle with human qualities, as if it
were some kind of patient monster waiting for the "fantastic
invasion" of white men to pass--or waiting to pounce on them.
This technique is called personification, and Conrad will use it
throughout to portray the wilderness.  By giving the dark jungle
intelligence, and a certain malice, he achieves some of his
creepiest effects.

The uncle's gesture toward the forest is so eerie and so
startling that Marlow forgets himself and leaps to his feet on
the boat.  The noise scares the wits out of the two men, and
after swearing from sheer fright they hurry off at once to the
station.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE JOURNEY UPRIVER

Finally the boat is repaired, and the time has come to start the
two-month voyage from the Central Station to Kurtz's Inner
Station, deep in the heart of the jungle.  The crew is composed
of Marlow, the manager, three or four of the pilgrims, and
around 30 cannibals they enlist along the way.

Marlow remembers the weird stillness of the jungle, a stillness
that isn't anything like peacefulness.  Conrad continues his
personification of the wilderness:  "It looked at you with a
vengeful aspect." It makes Marlow think of the prehistoric
jungle, and it seems monstrous, bewitching, creepy--and patient,
as if it were waiting to devour them.  The river is treacherous,
too; there are snags and shallows everywhere.

The Africans on board are cannibals, but instead of eating each
other they've brought along a load of hippo meat that eventually
goes rotten and starts to stink.  Marlow is especially
fascinated--and disturbed--by the tribal villages they pass.  As
the Africans catch sight of the boat, they break into an
"incomprehensible frenzy" of greeting.  They're so different
from the Europeans Marlow knows it's hard to believe they're the
same species.  And yet "They howled and leaped, and spun, and
made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of
their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship
with this remote and passionate uproar." Marlow is faintly
terrified to feel a responsive chord stirring within himself.
He knows there's something in these savage rites that attracts
him, that has meaning to him.

When he asks his audience, "You wonder I didn't go ashore for a
howl and a dance?" he isn't only joking.  And he isn't only
joking, either, when he tells them the reason he didn't:  "I had
no time." Work, we've already learned, is one of Marlow's
highest values.  Now work saves him from losing his mind in the
jungle.  When you have to attend to guiding a boat and looking
out for snags, and chopping wood for the steam engine to burn,
you don't have time to think about "the inner reality" of that
primitive call.  You stay busy with the "surface-truth" of doing
your job, instead of brooding and driving yourself crazy.

But the possibility remains:  the lure of savagery could take
somebody in.  We're going to see that happen eventually.

As if Marlow didn't have enough to keep him busy, he also has to
keep an eye on his African fireman.  (The fireman watches over
the steam engine, making sure that the boiler doesn't run out of
water to make steam with.) He has a few months of training and
he knows how to watch the boiler, but he no more understands
what he's doing than a dressed-up dog understands why he's
wearing clothes.  "What he knew," Marlow tells us, "was
this--that should the water in that transparent thing disappear,
the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the
greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance." At the
same time the fireman is working with modern technology, he's
standing there with his teeth filed and his hair shaved into
patterns and a bone through his lip.  When Marlow calls him "an
improved specimen," he's being sarcastic, and he's also showing
a certain pessimism toward the civilizing ideals--the notion of
carrying light into the darkness--that everybody in Africa was
mouthing at the time.  These people were trying to justify their
being in Africa by demonstrating how much progress they'd
brought the Africans.  But in this case, as with the torch in
Kurtz's painting, enlightenment doesn't seem to have banished
the darkness.  How much good has his smattering of education
done Marlow's fireman?

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE MESSAGE.  THE FOG.
CANNIBALS

Fifty miles from the Inner Station the boat steams up to an old
hut with a pile of wood in front and a faded message scrawled on
a piece of board:  "Wood for you.  Hurry up.  Approach
cautiously." The manager figures it must have been left by that
"miserable trader," the non-Company man he'd told his uncle he
would like to hang.  Marlow also finds a battered old book on
seamanship, with notes in the margin that appear to be written
in code ("cipher").  But why bring a book about ocean sailing
out into the middle of nowhere, and why go to the trouble to
make notes in code?  "It was an extravagant mystery."

The next evening they stop about eight miles below the Station.
Marlow is eager to press on and meet Kurtz at last, but they've
been warned to approach cautiously and sailing up in the dark
would be rash.  They drop anchor in the middle of the river.

When the sun rises they find themselves in the middle of a thick
fog "more blinding than the night."

NOTE:  In this instance Conrad reverses the usual associations
of light and dark:  here whiteness is threatening.  This isn't
the only point where such a reversal occurs.  There's also the
"whited sepulchre" of Brussels, for example.  And in general
it's the white race in Africa, not the black one, that's darkly
evil.

Around eight or nine o'clock the silent fog is pierced by a
loud, despairing cry.  It stops, and then a horrible tumult of
voices rises up from the banks.  The terrified pilgrims dart
into their cabins to grab their rifles.

The blacks on board, who are in unfamiliar country themselves,
have a different reaction.  They seem interested and
attentive--but not frightened.  Marlow talks to their young
leader (a figure of far more dignity than any of the ridiculous
pilgrims), who tells him, "Catch 'im.  Give 'im to us." Rather
amused, Marlow asks what they would do with their captives.
"Eat 'im!" the young cannibal curtly replies, and turns away.

Marlow isn't as shocked as you might expect, because it suddenly
dawns on him how hungry these men must be.  The whites eat
mainly out of tin cans they brought with them; but the hippo
meat that the blacks brought along was thrown overboard by the
pilgrims, who couldn't stand the rotten smell any longer.  Now
the poor blacks have nothing to eat.  They're paid three pieces
of brass wire weekly, which they're supposed to trade for food
with villagers along the way.  But most of the villages have
turned out to be either abandoned or unfriendly, or else the
unsympathetic manager, who has plenty of canned food of his own,
hasn't wanted to stop the boat.

In fact, now that he thinks about it, it amazes Marlow that
these 30 cannibals who must be practically starving haven't made
a meal of the five white men on board.  After all, what's to
stop them?  Starvation, Marlow knows, is the most horrible
hardship you can face.  But something restrains these men from
gobbling up their taskmasters.  "Restraint!  What possible
restraint?" Yet there it is, a tremendous mystery.

NOTE:  Restraint is as important a value to Marlow (and to
Conrad) as work is.  If people didn't exercise self-control,
society would turn into a jungle.  There's a special irony
operating here, since these typical inhabitants of the jungle
are showing such amazing and unexpected restraint.  The irony
will deepen later, when we encounter a highly "civilized" white
man of whom you would expect restraint, who's shown no restraint
at all.

Meanwhile, the obnoxious pilgrims are quarreling about which
bank the cries came from.  The manager halfheartedly urges
Marlow to risk setting sail in the fog, but Marlow refuses.  The
river is too treacherous, it's hard enough to keep from sinking
the boat when he can see the river, blinded by the fog, it would
be impossible.  Besides, Marlow doesn't really think they're
going to be attacked.  For one thing, any warriors who tried
coming out in a canoe would get lost in the fog.  But what
really convinces him they're probably safe is the way the cries
sounded.  They didn't seem threatening, Marlow says; "they had
given me an irresistible impression of sorrow," as if the sight
of the steamboat had filled these people with "unrestrained
grief." Marlow, as it turns out, will be proved half-right:
right about the grief, but wrong about the attack.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE ATTACK

The fog finally lifts, and the boat sets off again.  Pay
particular attention to Conrad's technique in the episode that
follows.  Conrad has often been called an "impressionist"
novelist, and it's easy to see why from his description of the
attack.  Marlow gives us a string of unconnected impressions,
telling us not what happened but exactly what he saw and felt.
Only afterward does he put his impressions together and make
sense out of them.  We get a sense of sensations followed by a
deduction:  Marlow is annoyed to see his poleman (the man who
operates the pole with which they test the depth of the water)
lie down flat on the deck, and is amazed when his fireman sits
down in front of the furnace and ducks his head.  Just then he
catches sight of a snag ahead of them.  At the same time, he
notices a shower of sticks whizzing around him.  Finally he puts
it all together and makes the deduction:  "Arrows, by Jove!  We
were being shot at!" Notice, by the way, that in his series of
impressions he includes the sighting of the snag, which doesn't
relate to the arrows and the actions of the poleman and the
fireman, but which has equal rank as a sensation.
They get around the snag, barely, and Marlow dashes into the
pilot-house (which contains the steering wheel) to close the
shutter on the land side.  The black helmsman (the man who
operates the steering wheel) is hysterical, stamping and
snorting and steering so badly that they're only ten feet from
the bank.  Marlow has to lean all the way out to grab the
shutter, and when he does, all at once he makes out the whole
swarm of naked arms and legs and chests, the army of
tribesmen.

Marlow spots another snag ahead, but before he can get a good
look at it, the pilgrims on deck below start firing wildly, and
he's blinded by the smoke rising from their rifles.  The
Africans on shore start to howl, and the blacks on the boat
raise a warlike whoop in return.  A rifle explodes at Marlow's
back--the fool of a helmsman has abandoned the wheel, thrown
open the shutter Marlow just closed, and he's firing the rifle
at the bank.  Marlow makes a dash for the wheel.  Since he can't
see the snag, the best he can do is steer close to the bank,
where he knows the water is deep, and hope for the best.

In the incident that follows we again get an excellent example
of Conrad's impressionist technique.  The crazy helmsman is
still at the open shutter, shaking the empty rifle and yelling
at the shore.  Suddenly he drops the gun overboard and falls
against the steering wheel.  He appears to be holding a long
cane at his side; it looks like in wrenching it away from one of
the warriors on shore he lost his balance and fell back.
Somehow they clear the second snag.  Then Marlow feels something
warm and wet on his feet, and looks down.  At once he puts his
impressions together and realizes what's happened.  His feet are
covered with blood:  the helmsman was speared and he's bleeding
to death on the floor of the cabin.  Marlow reaches for the line
of the steam whistle and sends out a series of screeches.  The
warlike yells stop, and the attackers let out a long wail of
fear and despair before they flee in terror.

One of the pilgrims appears in the doorway, and Marlow puts the
horrified man at the wheel.  Actually, the uppermost thought in
his mind is to get out of his bloody shoes and socks.  It isn't
unusual for people in extreme situations to fasten their minds
on such details, and Marlow's fixation on his shoes is comic and
gruesome at the same time.  But we may also wonder whether
irritation and hardship aren't taking their toll on Marlow's
nerves.  The doctor in Brussels had warned him to "avoid
irritation" and dropped hints about madness (I, 2).  Is Marlow,
perhaps, getting closer to the brink of insanity?

"He is dead," the pilgrim observes from the steering wheel; and
Marlow agrees rather inanely, "No doubt about it," adding that
by this time Mr.  Kurtz is probably dead, too--murdered by these
hostile natives.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ

At this point Marlow breaks off his tale and launches into a
long, rambling discussion of Mr.  Kurtz--who hasn't yet appeared
on the scene.  This would be an odd technique for most novels.
But for a story being told aloud it seems absolutely right:
nowhere do we get a stronger sense of Marlow's speaking voice.

When Marlow says, after the attack, that Kurtz is probably dead
by now, it suddenly occurs to him how badly he had wanted to
talk to him.  He's heard all about Kurtz's gift of expression;
he wanted to hear him himself, and now that he's lost the chance
he's almost on the verge of tears.  Marlow admits that part of
the reason he was so upset was that he'd become a little
unbalanced.  For one thing, he'd had several small fevers while
he'd been in the jungle.  And, as he points out, his nerves were
in such a state that he'd just thrown a pair of perfectly good
shoes overboard.

But as it turned out, Marlow tells his listeners bitterly, he
did get a chance to hear Kurtz talk--and he heard more than
enough.  He alludes to a girl, and he tells them he finally put
Kurtz's ghost to rest with a lie.  But then he's startled at his
own words.  "Girl!  What?  Did I mention a girl?  Oh, she is out
of it--completely." He repeats his convictions about the
beautiful illusions of women, and how men "must help them to
stay in that beautiful world of their own." Then he says
something about "the disinterred body of Mr.  Kurtz saying, 'My
Intended.'"

NOTE:  By now you'll probably be thoroughly confused.  Conrad is
playing with our curiosity by dropping hints about what will
happen later in the story.  Did Kurtz die, we wonder.  Did his
corpse really talk about his "Intended"?  Is that the girl
Marlow is talking about?

Marlow now divulges the truth about Kurtz.  The wilderness, he
tells his listeners, had made Kurtz its own.  He was unable to
resist; you can't possibly imagine what solitude, "utter
solitude without a policeman," can do to a person's mind.  The
only people who are safe from that kind of madness are the fool,
who's too stupid to realize that he's "being assaulted by the
powers of darkness," and the saint, "deaf and blind to anything
but heavenly sights and sounds." (You'll see examples of both in
the pages to come.) But the only protection that the rest of us
have--Marlow repeats his favorite nostrum--is work, "your power
of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking
business."

Kurtz represents words, not work; Marlow imagines him simply as
a voice.  He fell prey to the jungle; his nerves went wrong.  He
participated in "inconceivable ceremonies" and "unspeakable
rites." The "powers of darkness claimed him for their own," and
he took "a high seat among the devils of the land."

NOTE:  Critics have disagreed about Marlow's vagueness here.
Some feel that Conrad owes us a fuller description of Kurtz's
crimes, and that by being indefinite he was dodging the issue.
Others think that these obscure suggestions are much eerier than
any explicit description could be.  (Once again we should call
to mind Conrad's statement that explicitness "is fatal to the
glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all
suggestiveness.") Of course, today we're inclined to want all
the scandalous details that a Victorian audience preferred to
leave unmentioned.

Instead of getting more explicit, Marlow tells a disturbing
story about a high-flown report Kurtz wrote for an organization
with a high-flown name, the International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs.  The report began by observing
that the white man with his superior technology (weapons, for
example) seemed like a god to the primitive African (a rather
ominous observation, Marlow adds, in light of what later
happened).  Its subject was the amazing power to do good that
the white man had.  But scrawled at the bottom of the last page,
much later, was this chilling note:  "Exterminate all the
brutes!"

Marlow says, with bitter sarcasm, the Kurtz's report
demonstrated "the unbounded power of eloquence--of words--of
burning noble words." It went on and on about doing good, but
there were no practical suggestions about how to do it.  What
Marlow respects is work, not words.  Whenever anybody starts
spouting high ideals he gets suspicious, because experience has
taught him that ideals are too often just a mask to hide ugly
intentions.  The best example is the trading companies who are
always talking about helping and guiding the Africans when what
they're really doing is putting them in chains.  In a sense,
that terrible scrawled sentence is the one lightning-flash of
truth that breaks through the cloud cover of the white man's
lies; it's the evil secret of the white man.

The saddest irony is that Kurtz actually believed in the ideals
everybody else was just repeating mechanically.  The man with
the most elevated beliefs turns out to be the one who sinks the
lowest.  But at least he isn't one of the fools who don't even
perceive that the darkness is calling them.  "Whatever he was,"
Marlow tells his listeners, "he was not common." Keep this
statement in mind.  It sets Kurtz up as the opposite of the
characterless manager, lacking in all extraordinary qualities,
whom Marlow described as nothing more than a "common trader" (I,
4).

But saying he wasn't common is the most Marlow can say for
Kurtz.  He doesn't think getting to him was worth the death of
his helmsman--a preference for a black life over a (degraded)
white one that would certainly shock his racist colleagues.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE INNER STATION

The mention of the black helmsman returns Marlow's thoughts to
the thread of his story.  He already missed his dead helmsman
terribly, he tells us.  True, the man wasn't much of a sailor,
but they'd been working together for months, and over that time
a subtle bond had formed--a bond Marlow recognizes, admittedly,
only once it's broken.  And he feels "a claim of distant
kinship" with him.  Marlow has already told us about the "remote
kinship" he felt with the savages he saw on the voyage upriver
(II, 2).  But that was more abstract, and it was also
negative--it made him wonder about the savage buried somewhere
in himself.  But he misses the helmsman as you would miss a
colleague or a friend; he recognizes his humanity.  "Poor
fool!...  He had no restraint, no restraint--just like Kurtz."
It wouldn't be such an extraordinary reaction if it weren't so
isolated, set off by the racist brutality of the other whites.

The pilgrims and the manager are gathered out on the deck when
Marlow drags the body out of the cabin and tips it overboard.
They're rather piously shocked to see him dump the remains so
promptly, but he has a good reason.  He's heard an ominous
murmur from the cannibals below, and as much as he sympathizes
with their hunger, Marlow the Victorian doesn't sympathize by
any means with savage practices:  "I had made up my mind that if
my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have
him." He's also anxious to take the steering wheel from the
hands of the inept pilgrim behind it.

As Marlow steers, the pilgrims chatter (another instance of work
versus words).  They figure (wrongly) that Kurtz is dead and the
station burned to a cinder by hostile Africans.  And they
proudly congratulate themselves for having slaughtered so many
of them.  But Marlow saw them aiming high and shooting wildly.
He maintains (rightly) that the Africans fled in terror at the
sound of his whistle.

The boat is still headed for the Inner Station, or whatever is
left of it, but the manager prudently wants to get as far back
downriver as they can before dark.  But even as he's speaking
they steam up to a clearing, and they behold the Inner
Station--decaying, but in one piece.  It has no fence, but
Marlow spots what must be the remains of one--six upright posts
with what look like ornamental carved balls on top (remember
these).

An odd figure is shouting and beckoning them eagerly from the
bank:  young, beardless, blue eyed, and with so many brightly
colored patches neatly sewn all over his clothes that he reminds
Marlow of a harlequin, the traditional Italian clown who dresses
in motley.  His face, like a clown's face, is constantly
changing from merriment to gloom and back again.  He directs the
manager and the pilgrims uphill toward Kurtz, and stays behind
himself, jabbering to Marlow.  Marlow is uneasy about the
Africans in the bush behind the station, but the harlequin
assures him there's nothing to worry about:  "They are simple
people." He even goes so far as to claim they "meant no harm" by
the attack, though when Marlow stares at him, speechless, he's
compelled to add, lamely, "Not exactly." Nevertheless, he
advises Marlow to keep enough steam on the boiler to operate the
steam whistle, which frightens them far more than rifles (so
Marlow was right).

Something the harlequin says suggests that he's making up for a
long silence.  "Don't you talk with Mr.  Kurtz?" Marlow asks
him, and he immediately becomes reverent:  "You don't talk with
that man--you listen to him." Marlow learns that the young man
is a Russian who ran away from school and became a sailor, first
in the Russian, then the English navy.  "When one is young," the
harlequin tells him, "one must see things, gather experience,
ideas; enlarge the mind." Two years ago he had set out for the
interior of the jungle with "no more idea of what would happen
to him than a baby." The hut downriver where they found the pile
of wood and the message is his old house.

Marlow returns the book he found there.  "You made note in
Russian?" he asks, solving the mystery of the "coded" notes.
When he tries to find out why the natives attacked, the Russian
grows shamefaced:  "They don't want him to go." (Not an hour
before everyone was assuming Kurtz had been killed by hostile
Africans.) Now Marlow has the solution to two mysteries--the
coded notes, and also the enigmatic cry of despair that came
from the Africans when they spotted the steamboat approaching.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE RUSSIAN'S STORY

As the excitable, clownish young Russian prattles on, Marlow
envies his pure "spirit of adventure," not to mention "the
glamour of youth" in him.  But he doesn't envy him his devotion
to Kurtz.  We already know how little value Marlow places on
talk.  Now the impressionable youth tells him how Kurtz's
eloquence swayed him and made him into a follower.

In his digression on Kurtz (II, 5), Marlow had cited the saint
and the fool as types of people who, even alone in the jungle,
were safe from the lure of madness, the call of the darkness:
"Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull
even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness."
The Russian is just such a character; dressed in motley, he even
looks like a conventional fool.  He's a simple man utterly
lacking in malice, he couldn't harm a fly.  Even though he's
lived side-by-side with a man who's sunk to the most gruesome
depths of evil, he seems untouched by the horror of it; he
hardly even recognizes it.  There's something sweet and likable
about him, though you certainly can't approve of his attachment
to Kurtz.  He explains it simply:  "I have no great thoughts";
and Kurtz, we know, is made up of one "great thought" after
another--which isn't to say that the thoughts have any more
substance than the empty, high-toned words of his report to the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.
But the simple, trusting fool can't make this distinction.

The station house is decayed.  It turns out that Kurtz hardly
lived there.  He would disappear for long stretches into the
forest, where he'd discovered a lake and gotten to know the
Africans living around it.  His guns made him seem like a god to
them.  Remember the words of Kurtz's report to the International
Society:  the white men "must necessarily appear to them
[savages] in the nature of supernatural beings--we approach them
with might as of a deity" (II, 5).  Kurtz had used these
Africans as his personal army to raid others for ivory.  He
isn't a brilliant trader after all, just another ruthless
plunderer, no better than the "burglars" of the Eldorado
Exploring Expedition.  Once he even threatened to shoot the
Russian, who was hoarding a small quantity of ivory--"because he
could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on
earth to prevent him from killing whom he jolly well pleased."
Nothing, that is, but the restraint he lacks.  The law of the
jungle, as it's expressed here in the words of Kurtz, recalls
the words of the manager's despicable uncle:  "Get him hanged!
Why not?  Anything--anything can be done in this country." Kurtz
isn't, ultimately, a much better man.

Kurtz hated what was happening to him, the Russian continues,
but the wilderness had a grip on him and he couldn't tear
himself away.  Marlow, meanwhile, is nervously sweeping his
telescope along the side span of the jungle.  He spots an object
so startling that he reels back in surprise.  Earlier he had
mentioned the ornamental balls on the upright posts in front of
the house; through the telescope he sees that these carved balls
are really human heads.

Returning to a favorite theme, Marlow reflects that the heads
showed that Kurtz "lacked restraint in the gratification of his
various lusts." He also thinks Kurtz ultimately understood this
failing:  "I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at
the very last." (This is a foreshadowing that you should keep in
mind; later on it will provide a clue to the meaning of Kurtz's
final, enigmatic words.) But when the young Russian ventures to
tell Marlow more about the dark ceremonies Kurtz took part in,
Marlow cuts him off angrily (disappointing curious readers,
perhaps).  Suddenly he's too disgusted to hear more details; he
feels as though he's been confronted by a horror far worse than
"pure, uncomplicated savagery," which he says "has a right to
exist--obviously--in the sunshine."

NOTE:  Savages may be primitive, but they aren't evil.  Whatever
Conrad means by the darkness, it isn't, finally, simple
savagery.  Savages may be immersed in the darkness of ignorance
(the darkness that "enlightenment" is supposed to combat), but
not in the darkness of evil--Kurtz's darkness.  That wicked
aspect of the darkness enters the picture only when somebody
civilized plunges to savagery--it's the darkness of atavism.  It
isn't a disgrace to be uncivilized, unless you were civilized to
begin with.

Marlow is disgusted with the Russian, too, who has disgraced
himself at least in the sense that he's "crawled as much as the
veriest savage of them all" in bowing down to the "magnificent
eloquence" of Kurtz.  But circumstances are too much for this
poor, loyal fool, and he breaks down:  he's been struggling to
save Kurtz's life, he hasn't slept for ten nights, there's been
no medicine, no proper food, Kurtz was "shamefully abandoned....
Shamefully!  Shamefully!" We know from Marlow's earlier hint
that the manager sabotaged the steamboat, that he may be
right.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ.  HIS MISTRESS.  DEPARTURE
OF THE RUSSIAN

A group now appears from behind the house, and more than two
thirds of the way through the novel Kurtz finally makes his
appearance, borne on a stretcher.  Suddenly a cry pierces the
quiet afternoon (as a cry had pierced the silence of the fog
that morning) and the clearing fills with an army of barbarous
warriors.  Unless Kurtz says the right thing to them now, the
Russian whispers, they'll all be slaughtered.  Marlow bitterly
resents being at the mercy of a villain like Kurtz.  He can see
him out there, emaciated, phantomlike; and he can hear his
strong, deep voice.  Of course, it's appropriate that Kurtz, the
man of words, turns out to be a booming voice and not much more.
Apparently he says the right thing, because the savages vanish
into the forest and Kurtz is carried onto the boat.  He's still
heavily armed with the weapons that made him a god to the
Africans.

NOTE:  The prototype for Kurtz was Georges Antoine Klein, a
French employee of a Belgian concern in Africa, who died of
dysentery, much like Kurtz, aboard a steamer on the Congo River.
(Conrad was aboard the steamer when Klein died.) Dysentery is an
emaciating disease, and its horrifying effects are probably
behind Marlow's description of his first view of Kurtz:  "I
could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arms
waving.  It was as though an animated image of death carved out
of old ivory had been shaking its hand...."

The mention of ivory is important symbolically.  Earlier, during
his digression on Kurtz, Marlow said, "The wilderness had patted
him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball--an ivory ball"
(II, 5).  Now his whole body looks like ivory.  This is a
fitting image, since Kurtz has been possessed by the greed for
ivory, just as the ruthless Spanish conquistadors were possessed
by greed for the gold of Eldorado.  This isn't the only image
for his obsessive greed.  Marlow tells us, "I saw him open his
mouth wide--it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he
had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men
before him."

As the warriors move about indistinctly in the forest, Marlow
turns his gaze to a magnificent African woman striding back and
forth along the shore, her ornaments flashing in the dying
sunlight.  Wild-eyed, passionate, dangerous, she symbolizes to
Marlow the very soul of the jungle--savage, a thing to admire
but also to fear.  Note that his phrasing specifically connects
her with the wilderness.  Earlier he had sensed in the jungle
"an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention"
(II, 2); now he tells us the woman had "an air of brooding over
an inscrutable purpose." She comes up to the steamer and gazes
fiercely at the men on board; then, at a signal from her, the
warriors dart out of the forest, ready for blood.  Everyone
waits tensely.  But now that she's shown her power, she turns
away and walks slowly into the forest.

The opposition between Kurtz and the manager comes to a head.
Marlow hears Kurtz in his cabin ranting furiously, "You with
your little peddling notions--you are interfering with me." The
manager emerges, trying to look compassionate but obviously
gleeful at the downfall of his rival.  Immediately he expresses
his disapproval of Kurtz's crimes:  "Deplorable!  Upon the
whole, the trade will suffer." Kurtz was entirely right about
his "little peddling notions":  it isn't Kurtz's evil or his
brutality that disturbs the manager; it's his bad business
sense.  In fact, the worst he can say for Kurtz's "vigorous
action" is that "the time was not ripe" for it--as if it ever
would be.  But bureaucrat that he is, the manager can hardly
wait to deliver the final blow by filing a full report with the
Company.

Marlow is disgusted.  "it seemed to me I had never breathed an
atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for
relief--positively for relief." Kurtz may be evil, but something
about the manager is even worse; if the two of them represent "a
choice of nightmares," then Marlow is ready to choose.  Just as
he was prepared to lie to the brickmaker in order to help Kurtz,
whom he hadn't even met, he's prepared to defend him--even
though he's learned the ugly truth--before the manager.  Why
does he prefer the nightmare of Kurtz?  We should recall his
statement that "Whatever he was, he was not common" (II, 5); in
fact, he tells the manager, Kurtz is "a remarkable man." The
manager isn't remarkable or even competent (we've already seen
the chaos of his Central Station); he's merely a "common trader"
(I, 4), but also petty and conniving and greedy and, in his own
colorless way, just as murderous and evil, under the surface of
appearances, as Kurtz, though there's no speck of greatness in
him as there is in Kurtz.  Conrad uses him to stand for the
crimes of all the white men in Africa--hence the depth of
Marlow's disgust.  Marlow gets rid of him with a sarcastic
remark.

Presently the Russian interrupts his grim thoughts.  He's afraid
Marlow is going to repeat what he's learned about Kurtz from him
once he gets back to civilization.  Marlow assures him that Mr.
Kurtz's reputation is safe with him.  (He doesn't know, as the
end of the book will reveal, how truly he speaks.  Marlow has
made his choice of nightmares, and now he's destined to stay
loyal to Kurtz.) The Russian is also nervous about his own life,
and Marlow, remembering the conversation between the manager and
his uncle, tells him he's right to be:  "The manager thinks you
ought to be hanged." The man of patches decides he'd better
clear out at once.  But first he makes a final admission to
Marlow:  Kurtz himself ordered the attack on the steamer,
thinking it would scare the party away or that they'd give him
up for dead--which they almost did.  "He hated sometimes the
idea of being taken away." And then he vanishes in the night.

NOTE:  Another set of images you should take note of is part of
a pattern that's been developing since Chapter I.  Marlow
describes Kurtz as a "phantom," an "apparition," a "shadow."
Back when he was first sailing to Africa on the French steamer,
Marlow got an odd feeling that something was keeping him "away
from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and
senseless delusion" (I, 3).  At the Central Station, the air of
plotting, the philanthropic pretense, the pilgrims' talk and
their phony show of work were "unreal"--"By Jove!  I've never
seen anything so unreal in all my life" (II, 5).  And when he
let the brickmaker think that he really did have influence in
Europe, he told us, "I became in an instant as much of a
pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims" (II, 5).

The "phantom" Kurtz belongs to the realm of illusions, the realm
of words.  He's even deluded himself:  "I'll carry my ideals out
yet--I will return.  I'll show you what can be done," he cries
to the manager.  To this unreal world Marlow opposes (as we
already know) the value of work, which gives you the chance to
find "your own reality" (I, 6).  To take one example, the
Russian's little book on seamanship, with its charts and numbers
and diagrams, had "an honest concern for the right way of going
to work," and thus it struck Marlow as "something unmistakably
real" (II, 3).

Marlow makes an exception in his principles for women, who don't
work and who live in a world of "beautiful illusions" of which
he seems to approve.  We'll hear more about this subject in the
final pages of the novel.  It's hard to say why he should excuse
women--except that for a Victorian writer like Conrad women
simply didn't work, that was the order of things.  (We may
disagree strongly today.) In any case, women's world of
"beautiful illusions" is very different from the ugly realm of
delusions that Kurtz has created in the jungle.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ'S ESCAPE.  DEPARTURE

That night Marlow wakes up remembering the young Russian's vague
warning:  "I don't want any harm to come to these whites
here...." On an impulse he gets up to have a look around.  The
fires of Kurtz's army are flickering in the forest, and Marlow
can hear the regular beat of their drum and an occasional burst
of yells.  When he goes to check Kurtz's cabin, he finds him
missing.

At once Marlow feels overpowered by a "pure abstract terror" far
beyond any fear for his own skin.  Obviously the presence of
Kurtz has taken on a deep meaning for him.  But he also knows
that the boat is in deadly danger.  If Kurtz reaches the camp of
the warriors, he could order them to attack.  Marlow takes off
after him without waking anybody else--he wants to deal with
Kurtz alone.  In fact, he tells us that he was "jealous of
sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that
experience."

Why has Kurtz's presence become so important to Marlow, and why
does he feel that he has to deal with Kurtz all by himself?
Partly because in the fight he's about to put up for Kurtz's
soul, he'll be looking deep within his own.  Marlow's voyage
into the heart of the jungle has also been a voyage into the
heart of darkness within himself, a journey into the dark depths
of his own personality.  All the way upriver, Marlow has been
aware of the call of the darkness, just as he's been aware of
the beating of the drums.  The manager and the pilgrims are like
the fool Marlow said is "too dull even to know" the powers of
darkness are assaulting him (II, 5).  But Kurtz, like Marlow,
heard the call, and it overpowered him.  Clearly Marlow sees a
little bit of himself in Kurtz, and it frightens him.

There's an air of madness in his pursuit.  Marlow has been
growing increasingly unstable.  His mind wanders to various
unrelated images, and as he circles around to cut off Kurtz's
escape route, he's even giggling to himself.  He hears the
monotonous beat of the African drum and confuses it with his own
heartbeat.  Some readers regard this moment as the climax of
Marlow's inner journey, the moment when he perceives that the
darkness is not outside him, but inside.  But unlike Kurtz,
Marlow has the restraint to resist its call, even when the call
is coming from within himself.

They are about 30 yards from the nearest fire.  Kurtz is
crawling on all fours like an animal toward a witch-doctor,
wearing the horns of an animal--an image that sums up his
reversion to beastlike savagery.  When Kurtz hears Marlow
coming, he stands up, still seemingly unreal--"pale, indistinct,
like a vapor." But his voice is as usual real and strong, and if
he shouts it could be all over for Marlow.

Kurtz's attempt to get back to the tribe, Marlow tells us, isn't
a conscious choice but an instinctual one.  The wilderness has
him under its spell, and something inside him--"the awakening of
forgotten and brutal instincts, the memory of gratified and
monstrous passions"--is pulling him back.  But while his
instinct is drawing him back, Marlow tries to appeal to his
other side, his intellect.  "Believe me or not, his intelligence
was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true, upon himself with
horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance."
He has to figure out a way to lure Kurtz back to the boat, and
he hits on the idea of stroking his vanity, his desire for fame
and glory, the "horrible intensity" of his egoism.  As Kurtz
mutters about his "immense plans," the "great things" he was
going to accomplish, Marlow tells him he'll be "utterly lost" if
he doesn't return, but that if he does, "Your success in Europe
is assured."

"And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic, either," Marlow says,
verifying the Russian's earlier claim that Kurtz couldn't be
mad.  But he also knows that beyond his sane intelligence Kurtz
has another side:  "his soul was mad.  Being alone in the
wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens!  I
tell you, it had gone mad." And his soul is what's drawing him
irresistibly back to the darkness.  But though he has "a soul
that knew no restraint," he understands--intellectually--the
horror of what's happened to him.  Remember the Russian's
explanation:  "He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get
away." Now, when Marlow makes his appeal to Kurtz's intellect,
Kurtz has what he needs to triumph over his brute instincts, his
mad soul--the "warning voice of a kind neighbour...  whispering
of public opinion," as Marlow had put it earlier (II, 5).  He
wants to overcome himself, and so he listens.  And he returns to
the boat.

Clearly Marlow's exhaustion is more than physical.  It isn't
just Kurtz's soul he's been grappling with, but his own as well.
But once again his tasks as skipper intervene to keep him from
looking too deeply into himself.  The boat leaves, with Kurtz
aboard, at noon the next day.  (The struggle had taken place
near the opposite hour, midnight.  Appropriately, the contest
for Kurtz's soul happens in the heart of the night, the heart of
darkness; and Marlow, having won, leaves with Kurtz in the heart
of the day.) The African army has gathered ominously on the
banks of the river.  When Marlow asks Kurtz if he understands
their wild cries, he replies with a mysterious smile--"Do I
not?"--intimating that it isn't just the language he
understands, but the savagery as well.

Marlow pulls the string of the steam whistle to frighten the
warriors away.  The Africans flee in terror, with the exception
of Kurtz's savage mistress, who "did not so much as flinch, and
stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and
glittering river." (Remember this image; it will recur at the
end of the novel.)

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  KURTZ'S DEATH

As the boat steams swiftly downstream, Kurtz's life is ebbing
away.  Marlow has the grim double duty of overseeing his
dilapidated steamboat and of watching Kurtz die.  The trip is
especially unpleasant as the loathsome manager is watching the
demise of his rival with obvious satisfaction.

As Kurtz's body fades to nothing, his voice remains strong to
the last.  He doesn't stop talking until he's dead.  But his
subject matter disappoints Marlow after all the talk he's heard
about Kurtz's ideas.  Mostly he talks about his dreams of fame
and fortune, many of which are "contemptibly childish." His
fantasies of wealth and fame don't seem so different from those
of the pilgrims or the explorers of the Eldorado Expedition.  He
doesn't say much that would identify him with the "gang of
virtue," though he often repeats the kind of newspaper
platitudes Marlow heard in Brussels from his aunt.  This is
fitting, too, since as it turns out Kurtz was a journalist:  "He
had been writing for the papers and meant to do so again." (What
better occupation could there be for the man of words?) But when
the boat breaks down, Marlow has to spend most of his time
making repairs instead of listening to Kurtz (again, work versus
words)--"unless I had the shakes too bad to stand." Whether his
shakes come from the onset of a fever or the start of a mental
breakdown isn't quite clear, but we do know he's been deeply
upset by his encounter with Kurtz.

Kurtz raves on, never fully aware either of the depths to which
he sank at the Inner Station or of his approaching death.  "His
was an impenetrable darkness." One night it becomes so
impenetrable that when Marlow brings in a candle he can't see
the light.

At once Kurtz knows that he's about to die.  A change comes over
his face as if a veil had been torn away, and he has a final
vision, a "supreme moment of complete knowledge." Although
Marlow doesn't know what it is he sees or suddenly understands,
he hears his final words:  "The horror!  The horror!"

Marlow goes out to the mess room for dinner, but the meal is
interrupted by the manager's young servant, who announces
contemptuously, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." Considering that only a
short time before Kurtz had been adored as a god, the "tone of
scathing contempt" is an ironic comment on his ineffectuality,
his ultimate weakness.  The idealist who dreamed of moving
mountains, who "desired to have kings meet him at
railway-stations on his return," doesn't even have the respect
of the servants.

Marlow stays in the mess room to finish his meal, and as usual
his behavior shocks the pilgrims who are always piously keeping
up appearances.  ("However, I did not eat much," he adds dryly.)
Conrad certainly means us to interpret his reason in symbolic
terms:  "There was a lamp in there--light, don't you know--and
outside it was so beastly, beastly dark." A lamp may not be much
to hold against the universal dark, but it's something.

NOTE:  What is the meaning of Kurtz's final, chilling words?
Conrad provides a couple of clues.  Marlow says that the heads
around the station house "showed that Mr.  Kurtz lacked
restraint in the gratification of his various lusts," that there
was a deficiency, a lack of something, under all his magnificent
eloquence; and he adds, "I think the knowledge came to him at
last--only at the very last" (III, 1).  Now he tells us that
with these words Kurtz "had pronounced a judgment upon the
adventures of his soul on this earth." It seems clear that at
least on one level "the horror" refers to the abominable deeds
he committed out there in the jungle.  The words are a form of
revulsion, of repentance, of final, sorrowful knowledge.

But the way these words continue to haunt Marlow (and have
continued to haunt readers of Conrad) may lead us to wonder if
they don't carry a larger meaning as well.  Though there's an
element of madness to Kurtz, he's remained lucid enough for us
to wonder whether in casting off all restraints in the jungle,
he has faced, or found, some dark truth about the cosmos, a
truth that horrifies him.  Are his words a pronouncement on the
universe we all inhabit?

The 1890s were an era of pessimism in Victorian England.  The
ideal of progress had dominated the 19th century; it was widely
believed that science would eventually create a perfect world.
But by the end of the century it was obvious that the Industrial
Revolution, far from creating a perfect world, had only created
new forms of misery.  Technology could lead to enslavement and
death--as it had in Africa.  Kurtz symbolizes this failure of
technology.  After all, he goes to Africa with high and
beneficent ideals as an emissary of light" (in the phrase of
Marlow's aunt), but the darkness prevails.  Kurtz is the hope of
the 19th century perverted, the optimism that failed because it
failed to acknowledge its own heart of darkness.

Darwin's theory of evolution had also justified a certain
optimism.  After all, if his theories were correct, then the
history of life on our planet was a history of progress.  Each
form of life was higher than the one it evolved from; there was
a constant upward movement.  But by the end of the century the
Victorians had also recognized the other side of the coin:  no
matter how high we ascend, we're still bound to the lower forms
of life.  Marlow says as much when he's feeling the attraction
of the savages along the river:  "The mind of man is capable of
anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as
all the future" (II, 2).  Thus the possibility of reversion, of
atavism, is always there.  Kurtz travels to Africa thinking he's
the future, and what he finds in himself out there is the dim,
dark past.  We can read his final words not only as a judgment
of his own life, but as a warning against a condition that
threatens us all.  "The horror" is what he finds in the
darkness, and the darkness, he knows, is something that exists
in all of us.

But what exactly is the darkness?  In general, we can safely say
that the darkness represents the opposite of civilization.  Near
the beginning of the book Marlow observes, "We live in a
flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!
But darkness was here yesterday" (I, 1).  (Compare the opening
of Genesis:  "And the earth was without form and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep.") If the light of
civilization is only a flicker, then isn't the darkness more
powerful, surrounding us in space as well as in time?

The darkness also represents the unknown.  Thus Africa,
traditionally the Dark Continent, is "a place of darkness" for
Marlow (I, 2).  We live on a planet surrounded by darkness, and
there is a mysterious darkness deep within ourselves.  Marlow's
point in telling his tale is that we'd better acknowledge that
mysterious part of ourselves and learn to live with it--as he
did--or it will sneak up on us and overpower us, as it did
Kurtz, whose darkness becomes "impenetrable."

But you shouldn't confuse the darkness with simple savagery,
which, as Marlow says, is something that has "a right to
exist--obviously--in the sunshine" (III, 1).  After all, even
brute savagery represents a stage in the development of
civilization.  Marlow even has a grudging admiration, or at
least sympathy, for the savages he meets in Africa--they're
certainly no worse than the whites.

In fact, Conrad sometimes reverses the traditional associations
of light with good and dark with evil.  The darkness of the
jungle is certainly threatening.  But other images of evil and
of the unknown are white, for example, the fog that surrounds
the steamboat before it's attacked.  The city of Brussels, that
capital of hypocrisy, is a "whited sepulchre." Above all, the
monstrous villains Marlow encounters on his journey come not
from the dark race but almost without exception from the white
one.

The "heart of darkness" refers both to the jungle ("The brown
current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness"--III, 4) and
also to Kurtz (his eloquence doesn't hide "the barren darkness
of his heart"--III, 4), and thus, by extension, to the rest of
us.

Although Marlow recognizes the darkness, and although his tone
is generally pessimistic, he doesn't succumb to despair.  After
all (as we'll see in the pages to follow), Marlow survives his
ordeal--barely.  Unlike Kurtz, he has the ideals of work and
restraint to oppose the call of the jungle.  These may not seem
like much in the face of a universal darkness (just as the lamp
in the mess room seems pretty small against the "beastly dark"
outside), but modest as they are, they manage to see him
through.  Conrad was certainly pessimistic when he opposed the
encompassing darkness to the glib ideas of Victorian progress,
but there's a big difference between pessimism and despair.  The
darkness exists, Conrad was saying; acknowledge it and oppose
it.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  MARLOW'S ILLNESS AND RETURN

Following Kurtz's death, Marlow catches a fever that very nearly
kills him.  (This is partly autobiographical:  Conrad came down
with dysentery during his voyage on the Congo.) Marlow finds his
struggle with death "the most unexciting contest you can
imagine," and is distressed that he can find no final
pronouncement as strong as Kurtz's.  "This is the reason why I
affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man.  He had something to
say.  He said it....  He had summed up--he had judged." After
all, grim as it is, Kurtz's final whisper represents "the
expression of some sort of belief." Without moral beliefs you
can't make moral judgments, you can't think something is a
horror without a standard of good to compare it to.  Obviously
Kurtz failed to live up to his own standard, but at least he had
one.  So he can recognize the evil he performed, unlike the rest
of the whites in Africa, who would be shocked if you told them
they were doing anything immoral.

Marlow goes back to Brussels, and his words suggest that he's
suffered a mental breakdown as well as a fever:  "It was not my
strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted
soothing." As Kurtz has entrusted him with a packet of papers,
various interested parties show up to lay their claims.  The
Company sends a representative to retrieve whatever might help
in further exploitation of the territory; Marlow informs him,
coldly but truthfully, that the papers don't have that sort of
value.  (Obviously he's satisfied at being able to place himself
at last in open opposition to the odious Company.) A cousin of
Kurtz's claims some family letters and memoranda.  From this man
Marlow learns that Kurtz was a fine musician, a fact that
conforms with what we know of Kurtz's character--musicians being
often sensitive and high strung.  Marlow also receives a visit
from a journalist colleague of Kurtz's.  This man talks
admiringly of Kurtz's talents as a speaker; he thinks Kurtz had
the makings of a great radical politician.  This, too, we can
believe:  by now we've heard a good deal about Kurtz's humane
ideals and about the power he had to sway people with his
speech.  The journalist's remark that Kurtz "could get himself
to believe anything" is a little more ambiguous, though, since
it suggests that Kurtz's high ideals may not have gone very
deep.  Considering how totally he deserted them, this makes
sense, too.  Marlow gives this man Kurtz's report to the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs
(having been careful to tear off the scrawled postscript), and
the journalist carries this set of platitudes contentedly
away.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  THE LIE

More than a year after Kurtz's death, Marlow visits his
Intended, the woman he was engaged to, bearing a packet of
letters and a portrait of her that Kurtz had given him.  As he
approaches the house, he remembers again Kurtz's final stare,
"embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe," and his
final words.  (This passage suggests that those words go far
beyond a mere self-evaluation.)

In the upsetting scene that follows, it keeps getting darker and
darker.  Literally, of course, this is because of the sunset.
But in this scene Marlow's spirits sink lower than anywhere else
in the book (he has "something like despair" in his heart), and
the gradually encompassing darkness parallels his deepening
bewilderment.  In Africa he successfully opposed the darkness;
now, suddenly, his victory doesn't seem so final.

Mr.  Kurtz had participated in "unspeakable rites" and had gone
to his grave with "unspeakable secrets" in Africa.  But in this
quiet drawing room in Brussels, Marlow gets the panicky
sensation that he "had blundered into a place of cruel and
absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold." He
thought he had left the darkness in Africa, where you could
blame it on the jungle, but he's about to find out that the
darkness is universal.

The Intended is as eager to break her silence as the Russian had
been:  "She talked as thirsty men drink," of Kurtz's goodness
and his nobility and, of course, his eloquence.  Her belief in
Kurtz is a "great and saving illusion that shone with an
unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from
which I could not have defended her--from which I could not even
defend myself." Marlow has given his opinions previously about
the "beautiful illusions" of women, but face-to-face with this
awful delusion he can't be so smugly patronizing.  In fact, as
she goes on heaping praises on Kurtz--"It was impossible to know
him and not to admire him," etc.--he begins to despair.  Note
that the "great and saving illusion" is what Marlow connects
with the light shining against the growing darkness:  "But with
every word the room was growing darker, and only her forehead,
smooth and white, remained illumined by the unexstinguishable
light of belief and love." If this light burns from a mere
illusion, is it really "unexstinguishable"?

A gesture she makes, stretching her arms against the fading
sheen of the window, reminds Marlow of that final tragic gesture
of Kurtz's African mistress.  While this deluded woman talks on,
Marlow keeps remembering the real, the despicable Kurtz, and
"The horror!  The horror!" keeps echoing in his mind.  The
portrait of the Intended had revealed a "delicate shade of
truthfulness" in her features, but Marlow doesn't test it.  When
she asks him to repeat Kurtz's last words, he tells her, "The
last word he pronounced was--your name."

She cries out in triumph, then collapses weeping.  Marlow is
thunderstruck at his lie.  We know how much he hates a lie (I,
5).  We've seen him dodge telling the full truth on certain
occasions; we've even seen him let the brickmaker go on
believing something that wasn't true.  But we haven't seen him
lie outright--until now.  The truth, he says, "would have been
too dark--too dark altogether...."

Is the darkness, then, the ultimate truth, and light not just a
flicker but an illusion as well?  When do "beautiful illusions"
become ugly delusions?  Kurtz's "horror" has begun to seem like
Marlow's own judgment on the world of lies we live in, and on
this anguished note he breaks off his tale.

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  EPILOGUE

A brief paragraph brings the novel to a close.  The Director
notices that they've missed the turn of the tide, but now they
can proceed.

Marlow's story has had its effect on our narrator, at least.  At
the outset his senses were full of the light on the Thames, and
when he thought of the great British sailors he called them
"bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" who had carried light
into the unknown reaches of the world.  Now his mind is full of
darkness.  "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and
the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness."

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS:  GLOSSARY

ALIENEST Psychiatrist

ASSEGAIS Light, slender spears

ASTERN Toward the stern, or rear, of a boat

BOILER The tank or container in which water is heated into steam
to provide power for the steamboat.  A vertical boiler is a
relatively simple type that takes up little space.

BOWS (IN THE BOWS) Toward the bow, or front, of a boat

CALIPERS An instrument with two curved, movable legs, used to
measure the diameter of a thing

CONCERTINA A kind of small accordion

DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS English navigator (1540?-1596).  The first
Englishman to sail around the world, which he did in his ship
the Golden Hind (1577-80).  Participated in the defeat of the
Spanish Armada (1588).

ESTUARY The mouth of a river

FAIRWAY The navigable part of a river

FALERNIAN WINE A well-known ancient wine which was made in
southern Italy

FIREMAN The man who tends the steamboat's furnace, stoking it
with wood

FLEET STREET An important business street in London

FRANKLIN, SIR JOHN British explorer (1786-1847).  With his ships
the Erebus and the Terror, he set out for the Arctic in 1845 to
search for the Northwest Passage--an expedition that ended,
tragically, in the deaths of all members.

FUNNEL Smokestack

HELMSMAN The man at the helm (steering mechanism), who steers
the boat

MARTINI-HENRY A kind of military rifle

MEPHISTOPHELES In the Faust legend, the wily devil who tempts
Faust

MIZZENMAST A mast toward the back of a boat

OFFING The distant part of the sea visible from the shore

PILOT-HOUSE The enclosed cabin in which the helmsman steers the
boat

RAVENNA The site of an important Roman naval base in northern
Italy

SCOW A flat-bottomed boat with square ends, used for
transporting freight

SOUNDING-POLE The long pole used to sound, or measure, the depth
of the water

STERN-WHEEL The paddle wheel at the back (stern) of a
steamboat

STONE 14 Pounds (British measurement) 16 stone = 224 pounds

TIME CONTRACTS Legal contracts to work for a specified period of
time.  Such contracts were used to exploit the African natives,
who had little understanding of European law.

TRIREME An ancient Roman ship with three tiers of oars on each
side

YAWL A small sailboat

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THE PLOT

A young captain in the British merchant marine has just set out
on his first command, starting through the Gulf of Siam
(Thailand) and heading home.  He was hired unexpectedly only two
weeks before.  So, while his men know one another well, he's the
only stranger on board, and he's nervous about the impression
he'll make, especially on his first mate, a fussy and not very
bright seaman, and his sneering second mate, who's the only man
aboard younger than the captain.

The captain volunteers to take the anchor watch, staying on deck
late to watch for the wind they need.  While alone there, he's
astonished to discover a swimmer clinging to the ship's ladder,
and he takes him aboard.  The man's name is Leggatt, and he's a
fugitive from the Sephora, another British ship anchored nearby.
Leggatt was the ship's first mate, and during a terrible storm
he killed a mutinous sailor.  He was being held to await trial
on shore.  The captain immediately develops a deep sympathy for
him, an identification so strong that soon he's calling him "my
second self." He agrees to hide him in his stateroom.

The next day a search party arrives from the Sephora, headed by
the ship's Captain Archbold.  Archbold is neither bold nor
intelligent, and according to Leggatt he's such a poor leader
that he went to pieces during the storm.  The captain protects
Leggatt, despite Archbold's suspicions.

Hiding Leggatt proves to be a terrible strain.  In order to
protect him, the captain has to behave so oddly and give so many
peculiar orders that the crew--whose opinions he was so worried
about in the first place--begin to think he's crazy.  For his
part, he becomes so involved in the identity of the secret
sharer of his cabin that he finds it difficult to function when
he's away from him.  One day, after almost being discovered by
the steward, Leggatt seems to have disappeared.  The captain is
more distressed at the prospect of losing his double than of
having him found out.

Finally they agree on an escape plan.  In carrying it out, the
captain demonstrates the bold and resolute action that
previously he wasn't sure he was capable of.  One night, under
the pretense that he's hunting for land breezes, he brings the
ship dangerously close to shore.  Leggatt escapes, but the crew
is terrified.  In the darkness the captain can't judge the
movement of the ship in relation to the water--until a floppy
hat he had given Leggatt comes floating by, showing him that the
back of the ship is moving too fast.  At the last minute he's
able to give the order to change direction, and he saves the
ship.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THE CAPTAIN-NARRATOR

The young captain who tells the story is the embodiment of
self-doubt.  His lack of resoluteness is a serious shortcoming
in a ship's commanding officer, and he's aware of it.  This may
be the reason he grows so quickly attached to Leggatt:  Leggatt
knows his own mind and is utterly resolute.  But in deciding to
hide Leggatt, the captain puts himself in a situation that
almost drives him over the edge into insanity.

Because he's young and unsure of himself and on his first
command and a stranger to the ship, the captain is overly
concerned about the opinions of his crew members--he worries so
much about what they'll think of him that he almost freezes up.
But at the same time he believes firmly in the principle of
hierarchy:  his word is law, and not to be questioned.  When he
starts giving senseless and, ultimately, dangerous commands in
order to protect Leggatt, he puts his crew to a difficult test:
how obedient should you be to a captain who seems determined to
sink the ship?  The special irony here is that after wanting his
crew's good opinion so much, the steps he takes to protect
Leggatt make him look like he's going out of his way to lose
it.

But though he's not completely admirable, he's a sympathetic
figure--partly because the story is told from his point of view.
He's far more intelligent than the rest of the crew or Captain
Archbold, and as a result he's contemptuous of them in a way
that's amusing to read about but would be less amusing if you
were a crew member.  (Probably we can catch a glimpse here of
Conrad the Polish aristocrat surrounded by the boorish sailors
of the British merchant marine.)

Nevertheless, in tough situations the captain handles himself,
and his ship, like an expert.  And he knows how to handle other
sailors, too, for example, the rough-mannered Captain Archbold
(whom he unnerves with politeness) and the insolent second mate
(whom he sharply rebukes).  In the final scene, he shows
terrific competence by maneuvering his ship out of danger (even
though he got it into danger in the first place).  It seems
clear at the end of the story that he'll make a fine and capable
captain.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  LEGGATT

Unlike the captain, Leggatt is a fully self-possessed young man.
He knows his own mind and he knows how to take bold and
courageous action--as he does during the storm on the Sephora,
when he takes matters into his own hands and sets the sail that
saves the ship.  And he's straightforward about himself:  he
doesn't try to excuse or soften the impact of his crime (the
murder of a mutinous sailor) when he tells the captain about it.
(The captain does the excusing for him.) But he has a clear
conscience and he's eager to escape.  He accepts the captain's
help without questioning it or feeling guilty about the
nightmare he puts the captain through as a result.  He doesn't
suffer, as the captain does, from looking at things too
deeply.

If anything, Leggatt is too impulsive.  We can admire the
directness with which, during an emergency, he knocked down an
insolent sailor who was endangering the lives of the crew.  But
strangling the man to death is a different matter.  Since we see
Leggatt only through the captain's eyes, though, it's difficult
to get a clear picture of him.  We may get a sense that the
captain is willing to excuse too much in him, but we can also
sympathize with the isolation of this hero-criminal from the
rest of his crew, and be moved when he tells the captain how
much his understanding has meant to him.

Leggatt's personality is convincingly drawn.  But what does
Leggatt mean?  The more than fifty references to doubling, the
notion that Leggatt is somehow a part of the captain-narrator's
self, have tantalized readers ever since the story was first
published.  Some readers think that Leggatt is the captain's
moral conscience; others, that he represents the unconscious
impulses below the surface of the captain's mind.  Some argue
that he symbolizes the criminal side of the captain, the vicious
impulses he has to master and dominate; others insist that he
stands for the captain's ideal image of himself.  And some
exasperated readers have decided that all this symbolism is no
more than an intellectual tease.  According to them, you should
enjoy "The Secret Sharer" as the fine adventure it is, and not
worry yourself with digging for hidden meanings.  You'll have to
decide for yourself what you think Leggatt stands for--or if he
stands for anything.  Whatever meaning Conrad had in mind, he
didn't provide us with enough evidence to produce a firm and
final interpretation.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  CAPTAIN ARCHBOLD

Captain Archbold, the commanding officer of the Sephora (the
ship from which Leggatt escapes), can be summed up by the
adjectives "spiritless" and "unintelligent." If we can believe
Leggatt's story (and Archbold's own version seems to confirm
it), Archbold lost his nerve in the middle of the terrible
storm, and it was Leggatt who saved the ship.  But because
Leggatt killed a man, Archbold is unwilling to give him any
credit; he attributes the ship's survival, rather dishonestly,
to the hand of God, not Leggatt.  He adheres to the letter of
the law, not granting that there were unusual circumstances
around the crime.  He's really more concerned about the
embarrassment the crime will cause him than the merits of
Leggatt's case.  He suspects that the young captain may be
hiding Leggatt, but his plodding, stupid nature is no match for
the younger man's cleverness; the captain easily gets rid of him
(though there's a hint that Archbold knows the captain has made
a fool of him).  Conrad emphasizes his ridiculous side.  Thus,
even though the captain-narrator's interview with Archbold is
tense, it's also funny, because Conrad makes Archbold the butt
of several jokes.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  CHIEF MATE

The chief mate, with his "terrible growth of whisker" and his
honest devotion to the ship, might be a lovable character in
another context.  But seen through the contemptuous eyes of the
captain, he's an "imbecile" with "the 'Bless my soul--you don't
say so' type of intellect." There's certainly nothing vicious
about him, just irritating, but circumstances (the captain's
decision to hide Leggatt) turn this simple man into a threat.
He behaves badly in the crisis, becoming so unhinged (he raises
an arm "to batter his poor devoted head") that the captain has
to shake him like a child, but he manages to recover himself
before the end.  (In certain respects--dull intellect, lack of
fortitude in a crisis, whiskers--he resembles Captain Archbold.)
If the story were told from a different point of view, the
mate's position as chief officer under a captain who appears to
have lost his mind would make him a more sympathetic figure.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  SECOND MATE

The captain continually chides the second mate (the officer next
in line after captain and chief mate) as a "cub," emphasizing
his youth and inexperience; he's the only crew member younger
than the captain himself.  He's rather sour and unlikable.
Early on the captain catches him sneering at the chief mate, and
soon he's sneering at the captain as well--unpardonable behavior
in a subordinate officer.  But he gets a stern dressing-down
before the end of the story--an important act of self-assertion
for the captain, and a much-needed bit of discipline for the
second mate.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  STEWARD

The steward (the officer in charge of provisions, and the one
who cleans the captain's stateroom) isn't developed as a
character, but his predicament provides some of the funnier
moments in the story.  The captain keeps giving him
incomprehensible and ludicrous commands in order to keep Leggatt
well-hidden in his stateroom, until the bewildered man is at the
point of despair.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  SETTING

The action takes place in the Gulf of Siam (also called the Gulf
of Thailand), bordered by the Malay Archipelago on the west and
Cochin-China (part of Indochina) on the east; the ship sails out
of the Meinam River (better known today as the Chao Phraya) that
flows by the city of Bangkok at the very north of the gulf.
(When Conrad took command of the Otago in 1888, he, too, sailed
from Bangkok.) The ship sails down the Cochin-China coast, and
Leggatt makes his escape to the island of Koh-ring, off the
coast of Cambodge (Cambodia or Kampuchea).

The shipboard setting emphasizes the isolation of the crew, as
does the description of the gulf, which opens the story; the
captain has left his friends behind, and he's the only stranger
aboard.  It's also noteworthy that so much 'of the story--in
particular, Leggatt's arrival and escape--occurs at night, the
time for dreams, the domain of the unconscious.  To further the
association, both Leggatt and the captain wear sleeping suits.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THEME

"The Secret Sharer" portrays the friendship of two men during a
time of strain and crisis.  Each is able to offer the other
something he needs.  The captain offers the escaped killer
Leggatt both protection from the men who are pursuing him and,
eventually, escape.  Leggatt gives the captain something less
tangible--a lesson that he badly needs in self-possession,
self-reliance, and self-control.  In the course of the story,
the captain learns, largely from the example of the secret
sharer of his cabin and his life, how to be a good leader.  In
protecting him, he has to stop worrying about the opinions of
others and assert himself.

But firmness isn't the only quality in a good leader.  He needs
to be able to act resolutely, too, to give orders when necessary
without terrifying himself over what the consequences might be.
Captain Archbold is an example of a leader who can't act in a
crisis:  during the frightening storm that besets the Sephora,
he can't make himself give the order to set the sail that's
their last hope, because he's afraid of losing it.  But the
young captain maneuvers his own ship through hair-raising danger
along the shallow coast in order to help Leggatt escape.  After
this crisis, he's clearly in full possession of his abilities.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  STYLE

Conrad's style here is clean and direct, much simpler than the
digressive, garrulous narrative in Heart of Darkness.  "The
Secret Sharer" is a different kind of story; since it employs a
more traditional first-person point of view, Conrad doesn't need
to imitate the speaking voice of the narrator.  But whatever he
loses in complexity he gains in directness:  the story is
suspenseful and exciting in a way that the dense prose of Heart
of Darkness wouldn't convey.  His impressionist method is still
in evidence.  And when the author pauses for a picturesque
description, for example, of the Gulf of Siam and the "swarm of
stars" above it in the opening pages of the story, the effects
are rich and lovely.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  POINT OF VIEW

Imagine what it would be like to have the story narrated by the
chief mate, or by Captain Archbold:  our sympathy for both the
young captain and Leggatt would vanish.  A different point of
view would create a very different story.  If the story had an
omniscient narrator who could see into the minds of the various
characters, we would lose the fascination of what we don't
know--Leggatt's motivation.  (Is he, essentially, innocent or
guilty?  Has the captain acted foolishly or wisely in protecting
him?  There's evidence on both sides.) Finally, imagine the
story from Leggatt's point of view.  How would he see the young
captain--as a true friend, or as a dupe?

The captain bears a certain resemblance to the young Conrad, who
sailed his first command under similar windless conditions in
the Gulf of Siam (though apparently without stowaways).  But
unlike Marlow in Heart of Darkness, the captain is such a
fallible narrator, that is, so untrustworthy in much of what he
perceives, that we can't assume he's a stand-in for the author.
And, unlike Marlow, he relates events without thinking deeply
about them.  Marlow is always ruminating, judging, trying to
find the meaning in his own tale; the captain-narrator tells his
story as if he were unaware that it had any meaning at all.  He
doesn't guide us in interpreting his tale, and Conrad has kept
himself so distant that it isn't clear what he thinks of the
events, either.  So interpretation rests, even more fully than
in Heart of Darkness, with you the reader.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  FORM AND STRUCTURE

Like the style, the form of the tale is simple and
straightforward.  There isn't the experimentation, the jumping
around in time and space, that you find in many of Conrad's
other works (including Heart of Darkness).  The action all takes
place on one ship (except for the brief section in which Leggatt
tells his story), and it moves from beginning to end without
flashbacks or flashforwards.

In structure, there's a forward movement from ignorance to
knowledge--in this case, the captain's self-knowledge.  (In this
respect, the structure resembles the structure of Heart of
Darkness.) The young captain is a different and better man--or
at least, a better leader--at the end of the story than he was
at the beginning.  However we ultimately judge Leggatt, it seems
clear that the captain has profited by knowing and aiding him.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THE STORY

Conrad divided "The Secret Sharer" into two chapters.  To make
discussion easier, the chapters can be subdivided as follows:

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  CHAPTER I

1.  The New Command.

2.  Leggatt's Arrival.

3.  The Next Morning.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  CHAPTER II

1.  Captain Archbold of the Sephora.

2.  Scares.

3.  Escape.

Be sure to note that these subdivisions aren't Conrad's.  They
are used here in order to make the story easier to analyze and
discuss.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THE NEW COMMAND

"The Secret Sharer" opens with a description of the Gulf of Siam
from the deck of a ship--a description that serves two purposes.
The exotic locale (Gulf of Siam Meinam River, Paknam pagoda)
would have appealed to the landlocked magazine audience for whom
"The Secret Sharer" was specifically written (Conrad meant the
story to have popular appeal).  But the strangeness of the
surroundings also tells us something about the narrator's mental
state; he finds the setting in some way "incomprehensible" and
"crazy of aspect," and completely lacking (for the moment) in
signs of life.  The narrator is a young captain in the British
merchant marine, and this is his first command; he feels not
only the disquiet of unfamiliar surroundings, he also feels
literally alone--alone against the rest of the ship.  He was
appointed unexpectedly only two weeks before, and he doesn't
know either the men or the ship.  But the men all know each
other and the ship quite well.  So this first description
reflects the uneasiness of an isolated outsider.  Just before
the sun goes down, he spots the masts of a neighboring ship and
realizes he isn't entirely alone.  He doesn't know it yet, but
this ship will set the plot in motion and make his first command
more harrowing than he ever feared.

At dinner we're introduced to the two chief officers below the
captain.  The first mate is an older man, bearded and fussy and
not unduly intelligent.  (Later the narrator will call him an
"imbecile.") He's always saying witless things like "Bless my
soul!  You don't say so!" and trying to account to himself for
the most trivial incidents, such as how a scorpion got into his
inkwell.  (He'll soon be trying to account to himself for
something less trivial, the captain's seeming craziness.) The
young captain obviously thinks he's a stupid bore, but he also
wants his respect and his approval because he's new.

The second mate is the only person aboard who's younger than the
captain.  He's a rather sour young man with a tendency to sneer,
a quality highly inappropriate to a subordinate officer, and one
that the captain immediately disapproves of.  The second mate
informs them that the ship the captain spotted is another
English ship, named the Sephora.

Throughout the meal, the captain-narrator stresses the
alienation he felt as a stranger on board.  Obviously he has
very little self-confidence.  After dinner, as a gesture of good
will to the weary crew, he tells the first mate that he'll take
over the anchor watch himself, that is, he'll stay awake on
deck, watching for the wind they need to start their journey.
It's an unusual offer because the watch usually goes to those
lower in the ship's hierarchy.  The young captain immediately
regrets his offer, which he'd made to win the approval of the
sailors.  As we'll see, the captain is morbidly alert to the
reactions of his crew; and soon enough he'll be giving them
reason to wonder if he isn't really crazy.

Once everyone is asleep and he's alone on deck, he begins to
feel more peaceful.  True, he's isolated as he was in the
opening passage, but he's so nervous about the opinions of the
crew that being alone is a relief.  He begins to look forward to
the voyage home.  After all, he reflects, he's a good sailor;
"the sea was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly
for my discomfiture." The reflection is ironic, since even as
he's thinking, the sea is holding a surprise--a swimmer who will
turn his whole life upsidedown.  But right now he's rejoicing in
the nautical life and in "the great security of the sea as
compared with the unrest of the land," a life with "no
disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty"
of straightforwardness and singleness of purpose.  Again, the
observation is heavily ironic, for the young captain is about to
face a situation far less straightforward, and far more
insecure, than anything he's faced on land.

NOTE:  As with Heart of Darkness, "The Secret Sharer" has an
autobiographical element.  In 1888 (more than twenty years
before he wrote the story), Conrad took over command of the
Otago, sailing out of the Meinam River into the Gulf of
Siam--precisely where the ship in "The Secret Sharer" is
sailing.  He, too, was a new captain on his first command aboard
a ship that already had a crew.  He must have been nervous and
insecure; such feelings plagued Conrad throughout his life.  As
in the story, the journey through the gulf was made especially
difficult because there was so little wind.

The first mate is also based, at least in part, on the first
mate of the Otago, who was suspicious of the young Polish
captain (partly because he had hoped for the command himself).
Conrad later recalled:  "His eternally watchful demeanour, his
jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it were, determined silences,
seemed to imply--and, I believe, did imply--that to his mind the
ship was never safe in my hands....  On our first leaving
port...  a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of the
Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare." As we'll
see, this is exactly what takes place during the final pages of
the story.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  LEGGATT'S ARRIVAL

As the captain is moving placidly around the deck, he notices
that the ship's rope ladder has been left hanging over the side.
At first he's annoyed, but then instead of blaming the sailors
he blames himself for breaking their routine.  Thus we get an
idea of his compassion for his crew and his strictness toward
himself.  Again he regrets seeming eccentric by having taken the
anchor watch.

But as he goes to haul the ladder in, he's astonished to see a
man clinging to the bottom of it.  His first reaction is a
"horrid, frost-bound sensation" of pure terror--he sees no head.
Once again, he overreacts because of his own nervousness, in his
words, "my own troubled incertitude."

The man on the ladder exhibits the very opposite qualities.
Although "hesitating" and "slightly anxious" at first (we'll
find out in a moment why he has good reason to be), he becomes
"calm and resolute" as soon as he finds out he's talking to the
ship's captain, and he asks to come on board.  His
"self-possession" not only impresses the captain-narrator; it
also makes him feel calm and resolute himself.  And almost
everything Leggatt says gives evidence of his "strong soul."
(For example, he tells the captain he wasn't sure whether to
come aboard or to keep swimming until he sank from exhaustion;
and the captain recognizes his sincerity.) So from the very
first moments of his meeting with Leggatt, the captain finds
qualities in him that he desperately needs but feels that he
lacks.

There's another reason the captain so readily accepts him.
Leggatt is, like himself, a stranger aboard the ship, the only
other stranger, in fact.  They have the bond of mutual
isolation.  The captain has come to regard the crew as his
judges, but he doesn't have to prove himself to Leggatt.  So his
company is a relief, and immediately a "mysterious
communication" is established between them.

The captain takes the naked man up on deck, outfits him in one
of his own sleeping suits, and hears the story of his crime.
Leggatt was the first mate of the Sephora, whose captain was an
irresolute, nervous man, not a decisive leader.  (In this
respect, perhaps he wasn't so different from the captain Leggatt
is speaking to.) During a violent storm it had become necessary
to set the only sail they had left.  It was the ship's last
hope, but the captain couldn't work up the courage to give the
order and Leggatt had to take over himself.  While they were
struggling to set the sail, he was faced with the insolent
behavior of the crew's worst member:  "He wouldn't do his duty
and wouldn't let anybody else do theirs." They were in a
life-or-death situation, and finally the exasperated Leggatt
turned around and struck him.  They started to fight, but as
they were fighting, a huge wave crashed over the ship.  The
worst of the storm lasted for ten minutes, and when it cleared
somewhat, the crew found Leggatt with his hands on the neck of
the insolent sailor, who was dead from strangulation.

From the way Leggatt depicts his crime, we get a picture of him
as a man of direct, instinctual action.  He takes over the
setting of the sail himself, and when the sailor creates
trouble, Leggatt "turned round and felled him like an ox." He
tells the captain straightforwardly, "I've killed a man,"
without trying to soften the impact of the crime (though you can
sympathize with a first mate who hits a mutinous sailor).  "It's
clear that I meant business," he says, "because I was holding
him by the throat still when they picked us up.  He was black in
the face....  They had rather a job to separate us, I've been
told." These aren't the words of a man who's trying to make
excuses for himself.

The captain takes Leggatt down to his own stateroom, and now a
pattern of references on the "double" theme begins.  It will
continue unabated for the rest of the story--for instance, "my
double," "the secret sharer of my life." The two men are the
same size, both quite young (Leggatt is even younger than the
captain), and they're both graduates of the training ship Conway
(where Leggatt, not surprisingly, won a prize for swimming).
Even Leggatt's name has a double pair of double letters.

NOTE:  Once their "mysterious communication" has begun, it
becomes terrifically important for the captain to continue
identifying with Leggatt.  But why?  One reason, certainly, is
that Leggatt has the qualities of resoluteness and
self-confidence that he lacks.  But Conrad makes so much of the
theme of the double that its significance comes to seem deeper
than simply that.

Leggatt goes on with the story of his imprisonment and escape.
For the trembling captain of the Sephora he has nothing but
disdain:  "Devil only knows what the skipper wasn't afraid of
(all his nerve went to pieces altogether in that hellish spell
of bad weather we had)." (We'll meet the skipper of the Sephora
in the next chapter, so we'll be able to judge whether this
description is likely.) He felt essentially innocent--under the
circumstances, but not in the eyes of the law.  The captain
wouldn't agree to let him escape, but he seized the opportunity
when it presented itself, and swam that very evening from the
Sephora to the young captain's ship.  He's certain that a search
party from the Sephora will show up tomorrow.

As Leggatt talks, the captain-narrator again expresses his
self-doubt and his admiration for Leggatt when he imagines
Leggatt planning out an escape:  "a stubborn if not steadfast
operation; something of which I should have been perfectly
incapable." Though Leggatt isn't expecting the circumstances
that allow him to escape (the steward accidentally leaves his
door unlocked after delivering dinner), once he has the idea
he's in the water without a second thought, swimming as hard as
he can even though he doesn't know where.  Only later does he
spot the captain's ship.  The ladder hanging overboard is just a
lucky accident (and it won't be the last one in the story).

We also see that Leggatt is a man with a capacity for violence,
a man who certainly could commit a murder.  He twice says that
he didn't want to make an imperfect escape because if the crew
had come after him, "somebody would have got killed for
certain"; he admits he would have fought off anybody who laid a
hand on him, "like a wild beast." But the captain pays little
attention to this side of his character.  He's immediately
convinced (almost before hearing the story) that Leggatt acted
justifiably, if not legally, and he's willing to endanger his
own position in order to protect him.

Just as the captain's attraction to Leggatt is understandable,
so is Leggatt's to the captain:  he's provided him with an
almost miraculous escape.  But it's more than that.  Leggatt
says that his imprisonment aboard the Sephora was "a confounded
lonely time"; and when the captain had spotted him in the water,
he says, rather than being frightened, "I--I liked it." Leggatt
is even more isolated from his shipmates than the captain feels
from his own.  Though one is an outlaw and the other a stranger,
both feel threatened by their own communities; they feel an
immediate kinship.

It's quite late by now, and Leggatt is exhausted.  The captain
puts him to bed and he falls asleep at once.

NOTE:  Leggatt's tale is based on an actual event, though not
one that Conrad was involved in; he knew of it through hearsay
and newspaper accounts (it was widely reported).  In 1880, the
chief mate of the Cutty Sark got into an argument with one of
the seamen, who threatened the mate with a heavy bar.  The mate
wrested the bar from the seaman and knocked him unconscious with
it; three days later the seaman died.  The mate escaped (with
the help of the skipper), but he was eventually captured, tried,
and sentenced to seven years for manslaughter.

Leggatt, of course, is a flesh-and-blood character in the story;
but there are indications that Conrad regarded him as a
representative, in some sense, of part of the narrator's
consciousness.  (He considered naming the story "The Secret
Self," "The Second Self," or "The Other Self.") For example,
Leggatt shows up at night, he appears to rise from the depths of
the sea, and he wears the captain's sleeping suit--all symbols
associated with dreams and the unconscious.  And it's abundantly
clear, from the more than 50 references that link the two of
them, that Conrad was fascinated (he seems almost obsessed) with
the theme.  But what, then, does Leggatt represent?  There have
been almost as many answers to that question as there have been
readers of the story.  Some readers think that Leggatt
represents the captain's better side, his ideal self; others are
sure that he stands for the criminally impulsive side of himself
that the captain has to master.  And some readers think that as
a symbol Leggatt has been overinterpreted; they argue that the
story should be enjoyed as a fine adventure but not much beyond
that.  Ultimately, you'll have to decide for yourself what
Leggatt is supposed to mean (or what he means to you).  Conrad
constructed a tantalizing puzzle, but he neglected to give us
the key.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  THE NEXT MORNING

Having put Leggatt to bed, the captain feels too nervous to go
to sleep himself.  (He's the only character without the peace of
mind to sleep.  It was on account of his insomnia that he
volunteered to take the anchor watch in the first place.) He
sits on the couch, exhausted and bothered by a knocking in his
head--which turns out to be the steward knocking on his
stateroom door the next morning.  He's slept after all.

This passage gives us a fine example of Conrad's impressionist
method, though in staying true to the captain-narrator's
impressions it cheats a little bit.  "I was not sleepy; I could
not have gone to sleep," the captain reports; and we don't have
any reason not to believe him.  (He believes himself.) So when
in what seems like the next moment he's disturbed by a knocking
in his head that turns out to be the steward knocking on the
door, and we suddenly realize that several hours have passed,
we're as surprised as he is (or was).  We feel as if we're
experiencing the sensation (of knocking), and then the deduction
(it's the steward:  several hours have passed) at the same
moment he does.

At this point, the comedy of the steward begins; it will
continue, increasingly silly and funny and nerve-racking,
through much of the story.  The steward is just trying to do his
job, bring the captain his morning cup of coffee.  So when the
captain shouts, "This way!  I am here, steward," as if he were
miles away, the steward is understandably mystified.  He doesn't
know that Leggatt is concealed behind the bed-curtains or that
the captain fears he'll discover him.  He doesn't realize he
presents a threat.  He knows only what his senses tell him--that
the man is behaving bizarrely.  The captain behaves just as
bizarrely when he returns to warn him to close his porthole (the
men above are washing decks):  "I jumped up from the couch so
quickly that he gave a start." And when he tells the steward
that the porthole is already closed, that fact must seem even
stranger, since it's "as hot as an oven" in the cabin.  A
vicious circle has begun.  The captain is already more paranoid
than he should be about the opinions of his crew members.  But
now, in order to conceal Leggatt, he's about to begin acting in
ways that will really make them wonder about his sanity.  And as
they start to wonder, he feels doubly insecure.

In fact, when he marches up on deck he spies the steward and the
first and second mates gossiping together.  They part so hastily
when they see him coming that he has no doubt it's his behavior
they're talking about.  (For a change, his paranoia is
justified.) But instead of letting his anxiety make him even
more indecisive, he gathers his resolve (perhaps Leggatt is
already exerting a healthy effect on him) and barks out "the
first particular order I had given on board that ship; and I
stayed on deck to see it executed, too." He can't let his crew
get the upper hand--that could end up in their discovering
Leggatt.  He has no choice but to pull himself together and act
like the decisive commander he should have been in the first
place.  That way, nobody will have the nerve to question his
behavior, even when it seems erratic.  His stratagem apparently
works.  But meanwhile, firm as he is on the outside, he's
quaking on the inside.  The sensation of having a second self
down in his stateroom "distracted me almost to the point of
insanity....  It was very much like being mad."

NOTE:  The references to madness and to breakdown, which
continue throughout the story, are particularly interesting:
not very long after he wrote "The Secret Sharer," Conrad was to
suffer a nervous breakdown.

Leggatt is sleeping so soundly (again, he's associated with
sleep and dreams) that the captain has to "shake him for a solid
minute" before he wakes up.  Then he moves "as noiseless as a
ghost" (again, a hint--but only a hint--that there's something
less than physical about the double) into the bathroom while the
steward cleans the stateroom.  Leggatt is very much a night
creature; the captain observes his face "looking very sunken in
daylight." After the steward's departure, the captain continues
on his course of action to keep himself and Leggatt safe.  With
Leggatt still in the bathroom, he invites the meddling first
mate in for some unimportant small talk; "my object was to give
him an opportunity for a good look in my cabin" and thus to
allay any suspicions the man might have formed about what's
going on in there.  (At this point, though, there isn't much
reason for him to have formed any.) After that, captain and
double remain behind closed doors until the announcement that a
ship's boat (the search party from the Sephora) is on its way.
Leggatt gives a start (one of his few shows of anxiety), and the
captain strides up on deck to meet the boat.

NOTE:  At this point the first chapter ends.  As with Heart of
Darkness, chapter divisions have less to do with structure than
with the fact that the work ran as a serial, in this case in two
issues of the American Harper's Magazine, August and September
1910.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  CAPTAIN ARCHBOLD OF THE SEPHORA

The captain of the Sephora turns out to be a thoroughly
unimpressive man.  His stature is "middling," he looks around
"vaguely," he's "spiritless" and "unintelligent" and "densely
distressed," and we're told that he looked "muddled" and that he
"mumbled" in a "reluctant and doleful" way.  He makes such a
dull impression that our captain-narrator pays him the final
insult:  he's not even sure Archbold was his name.  Of course,
he's biased against him from the start.  He continues his course
of wily action, now pretending to be deaf so that the mumbling
Archbold has to raise his voice--and so that Leggatt can
overhear everything.

Conrad plays the scene for both tension and comedy.  Archbold's
plain manners and plodding stupidity make an easy target for the
clever and well-educated young captain.  For example, the
narrator is telling us about Archbold's description of Leggatt's
strangled victim:  "And as I gazed at him certainly not prepared
for anything original on his part, he advanced his head close to
mine and thrust his tongue out at me so suddenly that I couldn't
help starting back." Such ludicrous moments are even funnier
against the background of nerve-racking tension.

Having taken the law into his own hands in protecting Leggatt,
our captain sneers at Archbold's stubborn adherence to the
letter of the law.  When he mentions the setting of the sail
(Leggatt claimed he saved the ship by setting their last sail
during the storm), Archbold replies piously, "God's own hand in
it"--he's readier to ascribe their success to Providence than to
a murderer.  But something he says rings true with Leggatt's
version of the story:  "I don't mind telling you that I hardly
dared give the order.  It seemed impossible that we could touch
anything without losing it, and then our last hope would have
been gone." (Later Leggatt will insist that Archbold really did
fail to give the order, no matter how he remembers it now.) And
our captain observes that Archbold is still terrified by the
memory of the gale.  It was precisely this terror which so
disgusted Leggatt.

According to Archbold, he disliked Leggatt from the start.  "He
looked very smart, very gentlemanly, and all that.  But do you
know--I never liked him, somehow.  I am a plain man." In
response, the young captain smiles "urbanely," when urbanity is
exactly what Archbold is criticizing.  Still identifying with
his double, he's as offended as if Archbold were condemning him.
And in one sense he is:  the plain seafarer attacking the
manners of an aristocrat could be pointing a finger at either
one of them--or at Conrad, the Polish aristocrat who sailed with
common sailors.  They must have resented his polite manners as
deeply as he disdained their rough ones.  And in fact the
stratagem the young captain chooses for making Archbold
uncomfortable is politeness, which the unsophisticated Archbold
views as "a strange and unnatural phenomenon."

Little by little, Archbold grows suspicious, but he's
intimidated by the icy politeness of his host.  He begins to ask
leading questions, but the captain refuses to acknowledge his
hints.  When Archbold begins eying the various doors--Leggatt
might be behind any one of them--the captain pretends to think
he's interested in the ship.  Then he gets even ("I had been too
frightened not to feel vengeful") by leading him on a tedious
and irrelevant tour.  He speaks loudly in order to give Leggatt
plenty of warning as they're coming to his own stateroom, and it
works:  "My intelligent double had vanished." (In the captain's
eyes, Leggatt is the only other "intelligent" character.
Archbold is specifically "unintelligent"; the first mate is
"that imbecile.")

The first mate corners him after Archbold has left.  Is he
getting more suspicious?  The captain manages to put him off,
but he knows that the Sephora's men have told his crew about
Leggatt's escape.

Exhausted from his deception, the captain drifts toward despair.
He and Leggatt can hardly even whisper together.  "The Sunday
quietness of the ship was against us; the stillness of the air
and water around her was against us; the elements, the men were
against us--everything was against us in our secret partnership;
time itself--for this could not go on forever." Here we get the
first hint that they're going to have to plan Leggatt's escape
from the ship.  And we feel again the threat that makes the two
men feel closer than ever.

In the same bleak mood, the captain reflects:  "And as to the
chapter of accidents which counts for so much in the book of
success, I could only hope that it was closed.  For what
favorable accident could be expected?" Once again, his
hopelessness is unflattering in a man whose position calls for
him to be resolute.  When Leggatt jumped over the rail of the
Sephora, he didn't expect another ship to be anchored nearby,
and he certainly didn't expect its ladder to be hanging over the
side.  Lucky accidents have gotten him where he is.  And a lucky
accident will come to the aid of the captain, though in this
mood he wouldn't believe it.

From the captain's talk with Archbold, it's apparent that
Leggatt's version of events was essentially true.  Still, the
captain is even more eager to excuse Leggatt's crime than
Leggatt is to excuse himself.  (He wants to escape, but he isn't
protesting his innocence.) The captain places the blame on
impersonal forces:  "It was all very simple.  The same strung-up
force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for
their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy
mutinous existence." That's a comforting way of putting it,
because it leaves out the damning detail of Leggatt's hands
locked around his victim's neck.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  SCARES

At last the wind they've been waiting for starts up and the
captain takes command of his ship.  But he senses that he isn't
doing his best job--partly because he's left half of himself
down in his stateroom.  This missing half might be his
unconscious self, or the direct, instinctual side of himself:
"A certain order should spring on to [a seaman's] lips without
thinking; a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak,
without reflection.  But all unconscious alertness had abandoned
me.  I felt that I was appearing an irresolute commander...."

The captain is so lacking in self-possession that when he thinks
Leggatt is about to be discovered (to take one example), "I
could not govern my voice and conceal my agitation." Leggatt, on
the other hand, is "perfectly self-controlled, more than
calm--almost invulnerable"; he's "unyielding" and filled with
"unalterable purpose." The captain is succumbing to the strain
of the situation:  "I think I had come creeping quietly as near
insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border."
But not Leggatt:  "Whoever was being driven distracted, it was
not he.  He was sane."

The comedy of the steward now gets even broader.  The captain
has come to hate the sight of him simply because he's in charge
of tidying his stateroom.  The steward, for his part, is
something like a persecuted stooge in a slapstick movie.  "It
was this maddening course of being shouted at, checked without
rhyme or reason, arbitrarily chased out of my cabin, suddenly
called into it, sent flying out of his pantry on
incomprehensible errands, that accounted for the growing
wretchedness of his expression."

One day, for example, as the officers are dining, the captain
sees the steward carrying his coat, which has been drying on
deck, toward his stateroom.  He starts shouting at the man, to
alert Leggatt that somebody's approaching so he can slip into
the bathroom.  The other officers look at him like he's a
lunatic.  Then he hears the steward opening the bathroom door,
and he goes stony from fright.  The steward has decided to hang
the coat there because it's not quite dry yet.  But luckily he
just opens the door, reaches in, and hangs it on a hook, so he
doesn't see Leggatt squatting in the tub.  It's another
fortunate accident (and not the last).

The captain's reaction here has two interesting aspects.  First,
we get another hint--they're never more than hints--that there's
something unearthly about Leggatt.  When the captain sees him
again, "an irresistible doubt of his bodily existence flitted
through my mind.  Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not
visible to other eyes than mine?  It was like being haunted."
This is a tantalizing suggestion, but it doesn't lead anywhere
conclusive, because we know (from Archbold) that Leggatt is
real.

NOTE:  Conrad may have been playing homage here to The Turn of
the Screw by Henry James, a novelist he admired to the point of
considering him his mentor.  In that story, it's never clear
whether the ghosts are real, or imagined by the woman who sees
them.  In the case of "The Secret Sharer," the suggestion acts
as another hint that Leggatt on some level represents part of
the captain's mind, perhaps his unconscious self.

The other noteworthy aspect of the captain's reaction is his
attachment to Leggatt.  Only at first is he relieved when the
steward doesn't discover him:  "'Saved,' I thought.  'But, no!
Lost!  Gone!  He was gone!'" He's almost as distressed at having
lost his second self as at having him found out.  And when
Leggatt mentions that they need to start planning his escape,
his first response is to resist:  "Maroon you!  We are not
living in a boy's adventure tale." But Leggatt argues,
logically, that it's even more dangerous for him to stay on
board:  on a three-month passage he would certainly be
discovered.  The captain knows he's right, and with shame he
perceives that his resistance was "a sort of cowardice." He's
going to have to learn to function without the example of
Leggatt's self-possession and self-control.

Their reward is their mutual understanding.  "It's a great
satisfaction to have got somebody to understand," Leggatt
assures him.  They set the escape for the next night.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  ESCAPE

The captain's plan is simple:  bring the ship close to shore (on
the rather flimsy excuse that he's searching for "land breezes")
so that at an opportune moment Leggatt can slip into the water.
The two of them study the Cochin-China (Indochina) coast and
decide to aim for the large island of Koh-ring, off Cambodge
(Cambodia).  The only difficulty lies in getting the men to obey
the absurd and even dangerous orders that the plan calls for.
But the captain gathers his resolve and, with more
self-possession than ever before, plays the role of stern
commander to the hilt.  When the sneering second mate questions
the order to open the quarter-deck ports (the outlets at the end
of the quarter-deck giving onto the water), he gets the sharp
comeuppance he's been needing.  The first mate, too, is puzzled
and then alarmed.  (As we know, there may be an autobiographical
element here.)

Our last views of Leggatt are ambiguous.  The captain finds him
sitting quietly in his stateroom "like something against nature,
inhuman." Does this mean that Leggatt really does represent the
darker, criminal side of the captain's nature?  It's also
uncertain whether Leggatt is being sincere when he (at first)
refuses the money the captain presses on him.  (His main reason
for refusing seems to be that he doesn't have a safe place to
put it; when the captain offers a handkerchief to tie it in, he
doesn't need much more convincing.)

With another ridiculous order, the captain gets the steward out
of the way so that he can sneak Leggatt into the sail locker
(where the sails are kept).  From here he'll be able to steal
across the quarter-deck, out the quarter-deck ports, and into
the sea.  As an afterthought, the captain gives him his floppy
hat to protect him from the sun when he reaches land.

With Leggatt hidden in the sail locker, the next order of
business is to approach the island of Koh-ring.  The captain
sails dangerously close to the shore.  Leggatt, we know, is a
good swimmer; does the captain need to endanger his ship and his
crew to the extent that he does?  Is his behavior absurdly
dangerous?  Or is he using the occasion to assert himself, to
show that he's in full control?  He demonstrates his nerve, he
never lets on that he's frightened, and he certainly manages to
scare the daylights out of his crew.  The first mate, in
particular, goes completely to pieces, much in the manner we
heard Captain Archbold had done.  The captain has to shake him
like a child to make him pull himself together.

The last section of the story is hair-raising to read.  In the
shadow of Koh-ring, it's as dark as "the very gate of Erebus,"
the pitch-dark entrance to Hades.  Not knowing the ship well,
the captain can't tell whether or which way it's moving in the
water.  He needs a marker, but there's no time to find something
he can drop into the water to judge the position of the ship in
relation to the surface.  A final lucky accident saves him:  the
hat he had given Leggatt comes floating by; it must have fallen
off when Leggatt went in.  From its motion he can tell that
their rear is moving too much, and just in time he gives the
order to change direction.  They barely make it, and the men let
out a cheer.

The captain created the danger, but he also rescued the ship.
On another level, the captain's irresoluteness brought on a
situation that was bad for the ship, and his new ability to
assert himself remedies the situation.  The hat is a visible
symbol of the action he's taken, action he needed to take from
the very beginning.

Rather than missing his double, the captain is relieved to have
him gone.  He makes it clear that from here on out his journey
will be a smooth one, "the perfect communion of a seaman with
his first command." He hardly thought of his double (he tells us
explicitly) during the crisis; at last he feels whole,
integrated, and capable in himself.  He devotes a few moments to
thoughts of Leggatt--"a free man, a proud swimmer striking out
for a new destiny." This may strike you as an overly
romanticized way to describe a man who, we've just been told,
will be "hidden forever from all friendly faces," "a fugitive
and a vagabond on the earth." (The man who provided the
inspiration for Leggatt was captured and sentenced to seven
years.) But the words make a lot more sense if you apply them to
the double's double--the captain himself.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE SECRET SHARER:  NAUTICAL GLOSSARY

ALEE Leeward; the direction toward which the wind is blowing.
HARD ALEE!  All the way leeward

ANCHOR WATCH The part of the crew, usually one man, who stays on
duty at night while the ship is at anchor

BARE POLES Masts without sails

BINNACLE The stand on which a ship's compass rests

BREAK (OF THE POOP) The point where the (poop) deck ends

COMING-TO Moving the ship's front toward the wind

CUDDY A small cabin

DEEP SHIP A ship that sits low in the water

GIMBALS A device for suspending articles to keep them horizontal
despite the motion of the ship

MAINSAIL HAUL!  An order to adjust the mainsail (on the
mainmast) so as to head directly into the wind

OVERHAUL To slacken (a rope)

POOP (DECK) A raised deck at the stern of a ship

READY ABOUT An order used in tacking.  To come about is to pass
from one tack to the other.

REEFED SAIL A sail whose size has been reduced by folding

RIDING LIGHT Light shown at night by a ship at anchor

SHE WILL WEATHER the ship won't go ashore.  SHE WILL NEVER
WEATHER the ship will drift ashore and be grounded.

SHOALS Shallows

SQUARE THE YARDS BY LIFTS AND BRACES To set the yards at right
angles to the keel and the masts

STAND IN To take the ship toward the shore

STAYS:  IN STAYS Changing to another tack

STERNWAY Backward motion of a ship

TACK The direction a ship is headed in relation to the position
of the sails.  To tack is to bring the ship into the wind and
around to catch the wind from the other side.

TAFFRAIL The rail at the back of a ship

WAIST The middle part of the deck

YARD A rod at right angles to a mast, to support a sail

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER:  ON CONRAD'S
OBSCURITY

What is so elusive about him is that he is always promising to
make some general philosophic statement about the universe, and
then refraining with a gruff disclaimer....  Is there not also a
central obscurity, something noble, heroic, beautiful, inspiring
half a dozen great books; but obscure, obscure?  These essays
[Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters, 1921] do suggest that he is
misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret
casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel; and
that we need not try to write him down philosophically, because
there is, in this particular direction, nothing to write.  No
creed, in fact.  Only opinions, and the right to throw them
overboard when facts make them look absurd.

-E.  M.  Forster, Abinger Harvest, 1936

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER:  ON THE
MEANINGS OF THE DARKNESS

[Marlow's perspective] can be summarised along the following
lines:  the physical universe began in darkness, and will end in
it, the same holds for the world of human history, which is dark
in the sense of being obscure, amoral, and without purpose; and
so, essentially, is man.  Through some fortuitous and
inexplicable development, however, men have occasionally been
able to bring light to this darkness in the form of
civilisation--a structure of behavior and belief which can
sometimes keep the darkness at bay.  But this containing action
is highly precarious, because the operations of darkness are
much more active, numerous, and omnipresent, both in society and
in the individual, than civilised people usually suppose.  They
must learn that light is not only a lesser force than darkness
in power, magnitude, and duration, but is in some way
subordinate to it, or included within it:  in short, that the
darkness which Marlow discovers in the wilderness, in Kurtz and
in himself, is the primary and all-encompassing reality of the
universe....  In any case, neither Conrad nor Marlow stands for
the position that darkness is irresistible; their attitude,
rather, is to enjoin us to defend ourselves in full knowledge of
the difficulties to which we have been blinded by the illusions
of civilisation.

-Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 1979

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER:  ON CONRAD'S
ORIGINALITY, AND WHERE IT FALLS SHORT

Conrad's innovation--or, in any case, the fictional technique
that he exploited with unprecedented thoroughness--is the double
plot:  neither allegory (where surface is something teasing, to
be got through), nor catch-all symbolism (where every knowing
particular signifies some universal or other), but a developing
order of actions so lucidly symbolic of a developing state of
spirit--from moment to moment, so morally identifiable--as to
suggest the conditions of allegory without forfeiting or even
subordinating the realistic "superficial" claim of the actions
and their actors....

The problem is, of course, Kurtz.  It is when we are on the
verge of meeting Kurtz that Marlow's "inconceivables" and
"impenetrables" begin to multiply at an alarming rate; it is
when we have already met him that we are urged to observe
"smiles of indefinable meaning" and to hear about "unspeakable
rites" and "gratified and monstrous passions" and "subtle
horrors"--words to hound the reader into a sense of enigmatic
awfulness that he would somehow be the better for not trying to
find a way through....  Unhappily, though, the effect...  is to
bring to mind and penetrate Conrad's magazine-writer style as
well as the hollowness of Kurtz's sentiments.

-Marvin Mudrick,

"The Originality of Conrad," 1959

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER:  ON COMPARING
THE TWO WORKS

"The Secret Sharer" is forthright in structure and simple in
style, as direct and immediate and frightening as any very
personal diary.  Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, is
evasive in structure and even uncomfortably wordy.  Words!  At
times Conrad and Marlow seem to want to erect (as does a
psychoanalyst's patient) a screen of words between themselves
and the horror of a half-remembered experience.

ut both stories are also dramas of consciousness and conscience,
symbolic explorations of inward complexity.  They are...
stories of youth's initiation into manhood and knowledge,
dramatized testings of personal strength and integrity,
psychological studies in half-conscious identification.  Why
does Marlow seek out and remain loyal to the unspeakable and
savage Kurtz in Heart of Darkness?  Why does the narrator (the
"I") of "The Secret Sharer" protect the criminally impulsive
Leggatt?  Both have identified themselves, temporarily, with
these outcast and more primitive beings; lived vicariously in
them.  In the unconscious mind of each of us slumber infinite
capacities for reversion and crime.  And our best chance for
survival, moral survival, lies in frankly recognizing these
capacities.

-Albert J.  Guerard,

"Introduction to the Signet Classic edition, 1950

^^^^^^^^^^
HEART OF DARKNESS & THE SECRET SHARER:  ON "THE SECRET
SHARER":  A SKEPTICAL VIEW

Usually, in the face of a work improperly understood, critics
blame one another; but in this case the work itself is at fault.
Although "The Secret Sharer" is a fascinating and provocative
story, its details are at times so vaguely portentous that
readers are seduced into hunting for a complex symbolic
consistency which the work does not possess....  Because of its
insistent promptings and seductive detail, "The Secret Sharer"
has become everybody's Rorschach test.

-Lawrence Graver,

Conrad's Short Fiction, 1969

                               THE END