Heart of Darkness

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of the heads against the humor of them as well. The heads show another point of Marlow’s character growth. He neither condemns nor applauds the heads, and this illuminates how Marlow views the world. Even in the things that seem most gruesome and evil, come some humor and goodness. Another crucial image of Marlow’s story is the fog the steamboat gets stuck in. Marlow describes the situation as no difference between up and down, and this is of extreme importance to the understanding of the novels. Without being able to understand differences, nothing has any meaning. Fog is the “confusion, danger, and the unseen” of the Congo River (Panek). Not only is Marlow surrounded by fog physically, but also mentally. They know nothing about the river ahead because the fog distorts the scenery. Some things may be seen, but never enough to know for sure. This is part of Marlow’s main argument that people must decide their own truth. The wildness that the African wilderness seems to promote is foreshadowed right away to Marlow before his journey gets going. He finds out that the captain he is replacing was killed over a trading disagreement between him and a chief. Even with this information, Marlow stays with his dreams to finish the empty map. Marlow describes the jungle as a living entity, much like the snake. “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest,” his description indicates fear of entering such a terrible place. However, he feels that he will never know unless he enters the darkness as well. The only way Marlow can be scared is if he can already identify his fear. The faint and entangled region of the jungle create this fear of the unknown in search of the soul.

Children do not have a concept of the unknown, and neither do adults. It is a formidable place, where anything can happen. It is a vast void, filled with billions of possibilities, both negative and positive. The fear of the unknown represented in Heart of Darkness deals with the journey into the unknown in search of the soul. The narrative structure of this story reflects the lessons Marlow learns. He begins his journey ignorant to the dangers of the Congo, only wanting the innocent dream of filling up his blank map. Once he meets Kurtz, we start to see how his views are changed. The conflict seems unidentifiable in the way that it is usually presented because the only conflict for Marlow is with himself. His journey is trying to navigate through the Congo while also finding who he is as a person, like one of the Company men or Kurtz. The climax of the story represents one of the parts of the chthonic experience—death. Kurtz tries to escape his fate of returning home by force and loses. However, Kurtz wishes are ultimately granted when he dies in the Congo. The story, however, has no real resolution. The ending seems to fade off in more of a denouement when Marlow returns to Belgium. Everything seems to be unimportant compared to the significance of what he experienced in the Congo. Conrad intentionally leaves no resolution to his confusing story because that is the lesson learned from the novel in the first place. Each reader must decipher the story from their own perspective.

The chthonic experience is from life to death and back again, and Marlow explains how his story represents this. The journey to the Heart of Darkness is to find one’s self. The center is the soul of each and every person, and in the heart lies “truth stripped of its cloak of time” (32). Today people are capable of everything done in the past and will do in the future. Darkness and light were here yesterday and will be here tomorrow, but in this moment today, we live in the flicker.