Heart of Darkness 299low labors to bring order into the chaotic operations
of the El Dorado Exploring Expedition. Later,
upriver, a well-used book on seamanship he finds in
an abandoned trading post represents for him “an
honest concern for the right way of going to work”
in contrast to the slipshod efforts of the Company.
The Belgian colonialist enterprise in Africa
not only takes its toll on the communal stability
of the Europeans, it even more profoundly uproots
and destabilizes the traditional indigenous African
cultures. For Marlow, this “detribalized” popula-
tion is now doubly alienated, a people without any
sustaining connection to a larger community, as in
his description of the ship’s native fireman: “He was
an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical
boiler.... He ought to have been clapping his hands
and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which
he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft.”
Marlow’s ironic juxtaposition of the fireman’s tech-
nical training and primitive thought (“witchcraft”)
suggests the colonized subject as a grotesque, a man
alienated from both worlds.
Yet it is in the figures of Kurtz and his native
“adorers” that Conrad most graphically illustrates
the “horror” inherent in the disconnection of self and
community. Kurtz, the object of Marlow’s journey
into the very “heart of darkness,” is, in many ways,
the ideal representation of European civilization:
educated, intelligent, artistic, idealistic, and hard-
working. He is a “gifted creature,” Marlow informs
his listeners, no “ordinary man.” In the jungle,
however, elevated to a semideity, with no laws or
customs to restrain him, Kurtz sits, surrounded by
the skulls of his enemies, at the heart of a demonic
parody of community combining the worst aspects
of European and African cultures. He has provoked
and organized the local chiefs into mercenary, even
genocidal warfare for the procurement of ivory.
Godlike, Kurtz is a law unto himself. “He declared
he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory,” a
witness tells Marlow, “... because he could do so,
and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on
earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well
pleased.” In Kurtz’s isolation, temptation, and fall;
in his final warning, “The horror! The horror!” (75);
and in Marlow’s adherence to the ethical codes of
the larger community and his narrating the caution-
ary tale to his compatriots, Heart of Darkness vividly
demonstrates the community roots of our social
identities and values.
Michael ZeitlerisOlatiOn in Heart of Darkness
Early in his narration, Marlow tries to put into the
minds of his listeners aboard the Nellie some com-
prehension of the significance Kurtz has come to
hold for him. He needs them to understand “how I
got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to
the place where I first met the poor chap.” “Do you
see him? Do you see the story?” he asks his audience.
His urgent questions are not simply rhetorical; this
encounter, after all, was no small matter to Marlow
but, rather, “the furthest point of navigation and the
culminating point of my experience.” In the silence
that follows, he answers his own question: “It is
impossible. We live as we dream—alone.” Marlow’s
anxieties about isolation as the true human condi-
tion haunt Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, even
as he struggles to communicate this knowledge to
others.
To be sure, Marlow strikes us from the start as
a solitary and isolated figure, one who, like Conrad
himself, is always an outsider. In temperament and
interests, he is not like other seamen whose “minds
are of the stay-at-home order,” the novel’s unnamed
narrator observes. Even on the Nellie, among friends,
he sits “apart, indistinct, and silent in the pose of a
meditating Buddha.” In his own narrative, it is clear
that Marlow, although a thoughtful and sensitive
observer, never appears at home among other people.
In Brussels, he feels as though he is in a “whited sep-
ulcher”; the Company employees uniformly annoy
or irritate him, and he feels himself an “imposter.”
His passage to Africa is spent in “isolation amongst
all these men with whom I had no point of contact.”
Avoiding his fellow travelers, he only connects with
the sea: “The voice of the surf heard now and then
was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother.
It was something natural, that had its reason, that
had a meaning.” On his arrival in the Congo, Mar-
low’s isolation deepens as he finds himself morally
outraged at the laziness, greed, cruelty, and utter
indifference to human suffering displayed by his
European coworkers. Yet he also fails to make any