Heart of Darkness

Love and hate, light and dark, good and evil—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness explores the rights and wrongs in life. A story of a man’s journey through the Congo is more than it may seem on the surface. It explores the idea of the choice between the lesser of two evils. Marlow is forced to compare himself to the colonial bureaucracy and the rebellious Kurtz. He finds, however, that to decide is impossible. Conrad shows the reader that truth is relative and so are absolutes through various symbols, images, characters, and narrative structure.

The women of the story are one of the symbols of the spectrum because we see both extremes from the intended and Kurtz’s African mistress. Marlow refers to women are the keepers of naive illusions in respect to intended at the end of story. While this seems like an insult, it is actually important because that naïveté creates societal ways to justify business. The women are powerful in the story Marlow recounts, although his description of them indicates otherwise. Whether posh and ignorant like the intended or strong willed like the mistress, women play a pivotal role. Marlow refers to the Congo River as being snake like. A snake can be looked at from many points of views, mythological, biblical, literal and metaphorically. The snake can represent all the difficulties of being able to find one's inner-self. The snake can represent some of the animal imagery in the novel. Perhaps this is a sign that the jungle is something living and not just an ordinary jungle. The snake in the story of Adam and Eve represents the devil and evil itself, but the river is still necessary to the journey. The way the river’s current flows makes traveling upstream more difficult, and Marlow also struggles upstream to understand his situation. The Flow downstream is much easier, and represents coming to terms with Kurtz’s ways. A third symbol is the two women knitting blankets. Marlow gets an eerie feeling that the two women knew “all about [him]”(Conrad 8). Also referred to as “guarding the door of darkness,” these women may symbolize two of the three fates of Ancient Greece. The third fate, however, is missing. One of the women is young, cheerful, and introduces everyone, while the other is old, ugly, and scrutinizing. The Moirae were thought to be young, representing birth, middle aged, representing life, and old, representing death. However, the story only seems to include birth and death, relating to the chthonic experience because one must determine the life for himself. All three symbols illustrate the necessity for the “evils,” and for the chthonic experience in that meaning can only be assigned by the person searching for it.

Kurtz is crucial to the understanding of this novel. He seems to be the archetype of evil while also not considered the antagonist. He is the equivalent of Withering Heights’s Heathcliff in the sense that he is both eloquent and cunning. Marlow observes and often references to Kurtzs’ hollowness. This is another comment that Marlow makes with a negative connotation but with a purpose. Because Kurtz is so empty, Marlow can project himself and others upon him. Kurtz is crucial for Marlow’s understanding of himself in relation to the company. Marlow learns of the man in the Congo and creates some meaning to his life based on that man, but is thrown off after meeting others who knew Kurtz beforehand. From the journalist, to the intended, to Kurtz’s cousin, each describe him differently, and Marlow’s memory of Kurtz is tainted. However, the image of the man Marlow met in the Congo stays with him no matter what. Many describe Marlow to be then good to Kurtz’s evil. However, Marlow may also be seen as the middle ground between the two extremes of Kurtz and The Company because he can see both sides and identifies a bit with each. Marlow himself is the biggest example of the fact that nothing is concrete, no right or wrong exist. Even surrounded but the two extremes of Kurtz and the Company, Marlow recognizes that neither are right or wrong. Kurtz may be labeled as evil while the Company the opposite, but there is good and evil in the both of them. Marlow then can act as a buffer between the two, and acts as a guide for the people who listen to his story. He may not die and suffer like Kurtz, and certainly does not share the values of the Company or live the privileged life that they do either. This is why Marlow tells his story—he is neither extreme of the spectrum, but realizes that neither are the Company and Kurtz. He tells his story to show that the idea of extremes may exist, but the extremes themselves do not. Marlow is forever plagued with the experiences of the Congo, and the only way to ease his mind is to recount the story. The rest of the characters are never named, only given general titles. Conrad takes this approach to express the theme of lost identity. The fact that Marlow and Kurtz are the only ones named proves that the journey to find one's self is one where not everything appears to be what it seems. In this long process one can change very much. Kurtz is a great example of this constant changing. Marlow sees how changed Kurtz is from meeting all those who knew him in the past.

One of the most important images of the story is the heads-on-sticks of Kurtz. Their appearance may be shocking for the reader, but Marlow was “not so shocked”(52). The way Marlow introduces the shrunken heads is almost nonchalant as he describes exactly how he reacted when he saw them. His indifference with the heads puts the horror