Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

In meat of Darkness Conrad tries to deal with issues which are approximately inexpressible. The mysterious effect of the hobo camp wild on Kurtz, and on Marlow himself, puzzles the imagination and bewilders the clearing. We faculty ask why Conrad conducts to tell the story through the character of Marlow, rather than simply to deal it as a first person narrative. The story is, in fact, active Kurtz, and about the way that contact with the primitive touches on the naive true(a)ism down the stairs human civilization, except it is also part of Marlows autobiography.Marlow is a character, non just a narrative interpretive program, and his characterization en adapteds us to judge and understand what he tells us. He stands for certain impressive value the functionality of the seamans life, the belief in the value of melt down, the refusal to judge too quickly, and the calmness of brain which allows him to consider and respond to the ambiguities in Kurtzs experience. With h is detached and skeptical manner, the reaping of a life among practical affaires, he makes the extraordinary story as believable as is possible. We do non identify with him exactly, and he is not simply the voice of Conrad, but he is a convincing and honest narrator who offers us glimpses into the ineffable.Much of the earlier part of the novel is concerned with establishing Marlows character and credentials as a narrator. The actual narrator who speaks on the first page tells us that Marlow is the sort of seaman who is trustworthiness personified (5). scarce he is not typical (8) in that to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the humbug (8), which perhaps prepares us for Marlows attempt to convey to us the master of his experience and its importance. The mari condemnation traditions and habits of mind are central to Marlow. He values work over fantasy. At the jungle station I went to work In that way merely it seemed to me I c ould keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life (33), which is a vital and mature desire in him. His instincts are to reject nonsense and absurdity and stick to the real.Talking to the ridiculous divisor at the station, this papier-mch Mephistopheles (37), he tells us of his horror of lies, not be movement he is in particular virtuous, but because there is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies which is exactly what I hate and detest in the universe (38-9). The agents insinuating invitation to Marlow to accept his petty corruptions meets with an instinctive shudder that speaks for his righteousness. all(prenominal) man wants to get on, says the agent. What more did I want? What I sincerely wanted was rivets, by heaven Rivets. To get on with the work (40). at that plaza is something wonderfully refreshing about such healthy disgust, and this contributes largely to our circle to listen to Marlow as the tale reaches its most critical stages.It was a relief, he say s to get back to the work of repairing the steamboat, not because he actually likes labor, but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality (41). A powerful mo handst for him is the discovery in the riverside army hut of Towsons manual on seamanship, which, in the middle of the chaotic orb of the jungle, gives him a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real (54), for the real is what he longs for, as the guarantee of sanity and purpose. It reassures him that the book has been studied and cared for, the rear lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread (54) and the borderline annotated with what he thinks is cipher but later discovers to be Russian.If Marlows integrity and loyalty to the real is created thoroughly, so are his attitudes to what he experiences before he meets Kurtz. Conrad gives him a style that is consistent. He is skeptical, a little sardonic, and down-to earth. He tells how he worked on his relations to try to ensure that he could go to AfricaThe men said My dear Fellow, and did nothing. Then would you believe it? I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, found the women to work to get a job. Heavens Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic disposition. She wrote It will be delightful (12)The voice is familiar, humorous and unaffected, and we feel every reason to trust what he says. His devotion to the real makes him immediately sensitive to dis frankness and skunkt. His view of progress is justifiably jaundiced. The captain whom he replaces has been killed I heard the original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens (13), and he is sure that afterwards the cause of progress got them, anyhow (14). His charge is a two-penny-half-penny river steamboat with a penny blab out attached (18) and he feels that his aunt negotiation rot when she describes him as an detective of light (18). He records the bizarre sight of a French warship lob bing shells into the jungle to destroy enemies (20).He is bewildered by the sight of the accountant at the station in his high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers (25) working alongside the black workmen who are dying in the grass. He encounters a white man who has the job of maintaining the road. He is drunk, and screwt say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles further on, may be considered a durable improvement (29). The man who tries to put out the fire in the chisel in shed carries a bucket and declares that everybody was behaving splendidly, splendidly, dipped about a dry quart of water and tore back again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail (33).Everywhere Marlows shrewd and juiceless intelligence spots the signs of decay, corruption and self-deception. The whole establishment at the jungle trading station is unr eal (35), and when the manager starts canting about Marlow being of the stark naked gang the gang of virtue (36) I nearly burst into a laugh (36). The whole experience has for him the insane logic of dream, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the unconvincing which is the very essence of dreams (39).Such judgments and descriptions strike the reader as immensely law-abiding and yet modestly expressed. Marlow feels fundamental decencies being abused by the compound trading world, and it is hardly surprising that he becomes increasingly interested in Kurtz, who is clearly feared as well as despised by the other agents, largely because he has some sort of vision, a commodity naughtily lacking in the ivory trading world. Marlows convincing honesty and down-to-earth qualities even make Conrads symbolism easy to approach.The Fate-like knitwork women in the Brussels office are entirely real as wel l as allusive. One wears a dress as unvarnished as an umbrella cover (14). Marlow notes how the two women introduce many to the unusual these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a agile pall (16). It is a rare and powerful effect, not clumsy, as it efficiency have been, because we are so convinced by Marlows practical and realistic attitude.When it comes to the encounter with Kurtz we are therefore ready to give Marlow the eud conveyonia of the doubt as he reveals his own complex attitude to the man, and tries to beg off what it is that Kurtz has seen and felt. It is Kurtzs idealism that first interests him, here in this nightmare place of unreason. The other agents laugh at his hope that Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanising (47). At the same time Marlow cannot escape the thought that the savage figures seen on the bank are not inhuman, the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (51) and we can see how he might understand how Kurtzs own soul has been captured by the nighttime.He finds that he wants to talk to Kurtz, even though he realizes as soon as he gets to Kurtzs station that He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land (70), something Marlow knows will be almost impossible for his audience to understand How could you? with solid pavement under your feet, border by kind neighbours (70). This is where Marlows story moves into the area of the incredible and the only partly expressible Kurtzs high-minded writings end of a sudden with the savage cry Exterminate all the brutes (72). The brother seaman talks of how Kurtz has inspired him I tell youthis man has enlarged my mind (78). only Marlow can only conclude Why Hes tired of(p) (81) despite the Russians protests.The skulls are the evidence of his total breakdown, that the darkness had whispered to him things about himself that he did no know (83). The spell of the wilderness had awakened forgotten and brutal instincts (94) in him and dragged his soul beyond the saltation of permitted aspirations (95). Marlow is able to see Kurtzs story as a tragedy. His aim had been to Live rightly, die, die (99) but he had not known what was in himself, and Marlows readiness to stand by him at the end, even to delivery him in a way, rests on an awareness that Kurtz was not despicable, and that he himself might well respond in the same way.He had made that survive stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitate foot (101). Back in Europe, like Gulliver, he is disgusted by his fellow man, like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger (102), and he lies to Kurtzs intended because neither she nor anyone else would be able to comprehend the truth.Marlow does not claim to know or understand everything. It is the retiring nature of his narrative stance that convinces us. The real narrator calls the whole thing one of Marlows inconclusive experiences (10). But no one could be omniscient with such a subject Marlow only glimpses one of the enceinte mysteries, and none of us is ever granted more than that. What Conrad has done is to choose a narrative method and a type of narrator which conveys as well as possible immensely difficult things.Works CitedConrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1973.