Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

In soreness of Darkness Conrad tries to mitt with issues which ar almost inexpressible. The mysterious effect of the hobo camp wilderness on Kurtz, and on Marlow himself, puzzles the imagination and bewilders the understanding. We cogency ask why Conrad chooses to tell the story through the character of Marlow, rather than simply to set it as a first person narrative. The story is, in fact, well-nigh Kurtz, and about the way that contact with the aboriginal touches on the heartyity beneath hu populace civilization, plainly it is also part of Marlows autobiography.Marlow is a character, non just a narrative translator, and his characterization en fittings us to judge and understand what he tells us. He stands for certain(a) impressive values the practicality of the seamans heart, the belief in the value of work, the refusal to judge too quickly, and the apathy of judgement which allows him to consider and respond to the ambiguities in Kurtzs receive. With his detached a nd skeptical manner, the fruit of a life among practical things, he makes the extraordinary story as believable as is possible. We do not direct with him exactly, and he is not simply the voice of Conrad, but he is a convincing and unpretentious teller 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). nevertheless he is not typical (8) in that to him the meaning of an episode was not inside comparable a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale (8), which perhaps prep atomic number 18s us for Marlows attempt to convey to us the scale of his experience and its importance. The maritime traditions and habits of mind are central to Marlow. He values work oer fantasy. At the jungle station I went to work In that way save it seemed to me I could o ccur 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 agent at the station, this papier-mch Mephistopheles (37), he tells us of his iniquity of lies, not because he is particularly virtuous, but because thither is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality rate in lies which is exactly what I hate and detest in the institution (38-9). The agents insinuating invitation to Marlow to let his petty corruptions meets with an instinctive shudder that speaks for his integrity. Every man wants to get on, says the agent. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven Rivets. To get on with the work (40). There is something wonderfully refresh about such healthy disgust, and this contributes generally to our readiness to listen to Marlow as the tale reaches its most small stages.It was a relief, he says to get sustain 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 moment for him is the find in the riverside hut of Towsons manual on seamanship, which, in the middle of the chaotic world 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 sanction of sanity and purpose. It reassures him that the book has been studied and cared for, the spine lovingly stitched afresh with fresh cotton line (54) and the margin annotated with what he thinks is cipher but later discovers to be Russian.If Marlows integrity and devotion 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 subatomic sardonic, and down-to earth. He tells how he worked on his relations to try to ensure that he could go to Afri caThe men verbalize My dear Fellow, and did nothing. Then would you believe it? I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work to get a job. celestial sphere Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She w guffe 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 irritable to dishonesty and cant. His view of progress is justifiably jaundiced. The captain whom he replaces has been killed I heard the original altercate arose from a misunderstanding about some hens (13), and he is sure that afterwards the cause of progress got them, leastways (14). His charge is a two-penny-half-penny river steamboat with a penny whistle attached (18) and he feels that his aunt talks rot when she describes him as an emissary of light (18). He records the bizarre sight of a French warship lobbing shells into the jungle to destroy ene mies (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 Cant say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet- mountain in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles further on, may be considered a permanent improvement (29). The man who tries to put out the fire in the store shed carries a bucket and declares that everybody was behaving splendidly, splendidly, dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail (33).Everywhere Marlows shrewd and ironical intelligence spots the signs of decay, corruption and self-deception. The strong establishment at the jungle trade station is unreal (35), and when the manager starts canting abo ut Marlow being of the bracing 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 incredible which is the very essence of dreams (39).Such judgments and descriptions strike the reader as immensely observant and yet modestly expressed. Marlow feels fundamental decencies being abused by the colonial 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 seriously lacking in the ivory trading world. Marlows convincing honesty and down-to-earth qualities even make Conrads symbolism easy to approach.The Fate-like plain stitch women in the Brussels office are entirely real as well as allusive. sensation wears a dress as plain as an u mbrella cover (14). Marlow notes how the two women introduce many another(prenominal) to the un do itn these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall (16). It is a rare and powerful effect, not clumsy, as it might 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 benefit of the mistrust as he reveals his own complex attitude to the man, and tries to explain 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 darkness.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 substantial pavement under your feet, surrounded 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 suddenly with the savage cry nullify all the brutes (72). The brother seaman talks of how Kurtz has inspired him I tell youthis man has enlarged my mind (78). tho Marlow can only conclude Why Hes mad (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 bounds 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 bringing 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 last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating 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 incomplete she nor anyone else would be able to comprehend the truth.Marlow does not claim to know or understand everything. It is the unassuming character of his narrative stance that convinces us. The real narrator calls the whole thing one of Marlows inconclu sive experiences (10). But no one could be omniscient with such a subject Marlow only glimpses one of the salient mysteries, and none of us is ever granted more than that. What Conrad has done is to choose a narrative manner and a type of narrator which conveys as well as possible immensely difficult things.Works CitedConrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1973.