Heart of Darkness - Part 1
by Esmee

Characters

The men aboard the Nellie 

The story begins with five men sitting who are sitting aboard the ship. Marlow later is the narrator and the rest is the audience. The narrator who starts the book seems to be influenced by Marlow’s story very much. He speaks in the first person plural and describes what all four think and feel, when Marlow tells the story. All of them have been seamen sometime, but then have settled and become workers. The other three men were the director of Companies and their host; the lawyer, who was the best of them, because of his age and his many virtues; and the accountant.
Aunt -
Without her he would had never got this job. At first he doesn’t like the idea of asking a woman for help. She believes in imperialism as a charitable activity that brings civilization to the savage of the natives. The reader knows that Marlow likes her, but sometimes he also makes fun of her.

Fresleven
He was the predecessor of Marlow as captain of the steamer. He is killed in a scuffle about some hens with the natives after striking a village chief. Marlow is sent to recover Fresleven’s bones.

Two women knitting black wool

The secretary 

Head of the company

The doctor
The second figure presiding over Marlow’s departure is the Company’s doctor. He seems a little bit strange, because in the interest of science, he measures every head of those who travel up to Congo River. On Marlow’s answer if there is changing something when they come back he says that he never saw them. Moreover, the changes are going on inside, not outside.

The captain of the Swedish steamer

Chief Accountant
An efficient worker with an incredible habit of dressing up in spotless whites and keeping himself absolutely tidy despite the squalor and heat of the Outer Station, where he lives and works. He is one of the few colonials who seem to have accomplished anything: he has trained a native woman to care for his wardrobe.

Pilgrims
These are the people with the staves which they take with them everywhere. They all want to be appointed to a station so that they can trade for ivory and earn a commission, but none of them actually takes any effective steps toward achieving this goal. They hate the natives, and treat them like animals, because of that greed for ivory. But they appear less than human themselves.

General Manager
He runs the Central station in Africa. He expresses uneasiness in those around him and he is average in appearance. He wants to control everybody.

Brickmaker
He works also at the Central station and it seems as if he is the favourite of the manager. He is here at the Central station for more than one and a half year. However, he has never made any bricks, as he is supposedly waiting for some essential element that is never delivered. Moreover, he seems to be a kind of corporate spy.

Marlow
He is the protagonist of Heart of Darkness and the narrator of nearly the whole book. He is very eloquent and he can show pictures to the reader with words. He doesn’t like the surroundings during the trip. All scares him a little bit. Typical of Marlow as a storyteller is: the ironic tone in his sentences, he gives the impression that his audience’s assumptions are wrong, but he does not present another possibility to it. During his trip his character is changing again and again.

Settings

The beginning: Nellie the ship, with the five persons on it.
[ The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. ] (p. 65)
[We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.] (p. 66)

Description of the surroundings, how is the mood, the weather and the starting night.
[And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.] (p. 66)
The current of the story isn’t there yet. It’s on the edge from the reality (when the men are sitting on the ship) and the story Marlow tells (about his trip up to Congo River). The longer the story lasts the more comes into the world with the contrasts: black/ white, fat/ slim, dark/ enlightened. But in fact the story gets more and more depressive and “darker”, the nearer you come to the end of the book.
Brussels: Marlow has got the job because of his aunt. He has left his aunt and is now on the way to the Company’s office, to Brussels. The office reminds him of a whited sepulchre. After he has signed the contract he has to visit the doctor.
["A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool.] (p. 73)

Description of the way to the office, the ominous mood
[A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted in the middle. From behind that structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man himself. He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many millions.] (p. 74)

Important remarks are the two knitting women in front of the waiting room, which guard the visitors of the office to the “Heart of darkness”. Here are the contrasts again: two women, the one black, the other white, the one slim, the other fat, but both are knitting black wool. After somebody left the office, they are knitting their wool feverishly. Maybe the author tried to symbolise, that the women know that if somebody has signed a contract he will never come back. [AVE! Old knitter of black wool. MORITURI TE SALUTANT.]
Marlow’s Aunt:
Marlow visits his aunt to thank her and say goodbye to her and leaves.

[I had a cup of tea -- the last decent cup of tea for many days -- and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fireside.] (p. 76)

The room is described a little bit for the picture of the reader.
French Steamer and Swede’s Steamer:
[I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you -- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.] Marlow describes what he sees during the trip, he describes the landscape and surroundings, all that what seems so ominous and strange to him.

["At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare.] (p. 79)

The Company’s station, the cliff and the blacks:
When you read the text it seems as if the whole region was brown, no plants, everybody is sad and the blacks all are going to die. They all are commanded by two or three white men, which do not treat them very well. The most worrying scene is where Marlow finds the dying group of blacks.

["I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly.] (p. 80)
You can see that everything is death, the inorganic things too, everything is broken, and everywhere is darkness.

[ "I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound -- as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible¹. ] (p. 81/82)
Everything is rough and everywhere are rocks. All is in disorder and nobody seems to care about the land. These pictures are combined with sounds¹.
The Outer Station’s Office:
Marlow first sees the chief accountant, who is very tidy and has good habits. When he sees his office it is the other way around. Everything is in disorder and the hut itself isn’t built very well. But Marlow respects the fellow.
[And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order.
"Everything else in the station was in a muddle -- heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory. ] (p. 83/84)

["I had to wait in the station for ten days -- an eternity. I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into the accountant's office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to open the big shutter to see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed.] (p. 84)
The Trip:
Marlow goes on a trip with the sixty men of the caravan, who have come to the Outer station. The region is vast and deserted because of the heat. Each man has to carry about 28 kg.

[Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long time ago.] (p. 85)
The Central station:
When Marlow arrives there he gets to know that he has got a steamer already, but it has been sunk. It takes him three months to repair her. One of the natives causes a burn of a hut and has been punished for that. Marlow has a talk with the manager and later with the brickmaker.

[It was as unreal as everything else -- as the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages.] (p. 91)

[I had my shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace.] (p. 93, 94)

Summary

When the sun sets a ship called Nellie has anchored at the mouth of the Thames. On the ship there are 5 men: the Director of Companies, who is also the captain and host, the Lawyer, the Accountant, Marlow, and the unnamed Narrator. They are all very meditative and tired. Slowly it gets dark and the night comes. Then Marlow starts to tell the story of his journey up the Congo River and remarks that this has been one of the darkest places on earth. He first has the idea to command a steamer when he comes back from a six-month journey from Asia. Back in London he sees a map of Africa and he remembers that when he has been young he has always wanted to see Africa.
The territory around the Congo was then a Belgian territory. Marlow’s aunt has had contacts to the Company’s administration and because of her influence he soon gets a job there, but he has also luck because a captain of one of the Company’s steamers has been killed in a scuffle with the natives. So Marlow gets the job.
He travels through the English Channel to Belgium to sign the contract for working at the Company’s. The city in which he comes reminds him of a whited sepulchre. Maybe it is Brussels.
Then Marlow tells the story about Fresleven, a guy, who has been killed in a fight over some hens. He has been fighting with the village chief and has then been stabbed by the chief’s son. The natives left the village and dead Fresleven has been left here to die. Now Marlow has been sent to recover Fresleven’s bones.
He arrives in Brussels at the Company’s office where two women sit in front of the office knitting wool, the one black and the other white. He later says that the wool is the entry to the heart of darkness. One of the women admits him to the waiting room. Then a secretary leads him to the meeting with the head of the company. Marlow signs the contract. Then he is told by the secretary to visit the doctor: a simple formality. In the interests of science the doctor measures his scull, talks to Marlow and remarks that he sees his patients never again and says that the changes take place inside.
After that he visits his aunt again to thank her and to say goodbye to her. Then he leaves her. Before he goes on board of the French steamer he has a strange feeling about the journey. He thinks he is travelling to the centre of the earth. The French steamer goes on along the coast of Africa and stops sometimes to land soldiers and custom house officers. To Marlow the whole trip is a little bit uncanny. When they finally arrive at the mouth of the Congo River Marlow boards another ship. The captain was a Swede and recognizes soon that Marlow is a seaman and invites him on deck. The Swede criticizes the colonial officials and tells Marlow about another Swede who recently hanged himself on his way into the interior.
When he arrives at the company’s station he sees how a cliff is being blasted. Some black prisoners are walking in along in chains under the control of another black who has an old uniform and carries a riffle. They are building a railway. Soon he comes to a grove of trees where black dying shapes are lying all around. He offers one of them a Swedish biscuit. After seeing this horror he meets the Company’s chief accountant, who is a very tidy and well prepared man, an ominous apparition. Marlow stays ten days at the station waiting for a caravan to the next station. One day the accountant tells him about Kurtz, a first class agent who deals with ivory. He asks Marlow to tell him that everything is satisfying here, because he doesn’t want to send a message with these message machines, because you never know who gets the message.
When the caravan of sixty men arrives they travel for fifteen days overland for two hundred miles to reach the Central station. One white companion falls ill and must be carried by the native bearers, who start to desert because of the added burden.
When he arrives there he finds out that his steamer has been sunk. The general manager of the Central Station has taken the boat out two days before under the charge of a volunteer skipper, and they have torn the bottom out on some rocks. Marlow thinks that it hasn’t been fate that this happened to him, but somebody has done this to him to prohibit reaching Kurtz.
Marlow meets the manager, an uneasy appearance. He tells Marlow that Kurtz is rumoured to be ill. They talk about the repair of the steamer which lasts about three months.
One day a grass-made hut burns down and the natives dance around it. One of them has been accused to cause the burn and is beaten severely and he disappears into the forest after he recovers. Near the burnt hut Marlow recognizes the brickmaker and the manager talking to each other. After the manager has left he talks to the brickmaker and finds out that he is a spy or something like. The strange thing is he never actually produces any bricks, as he is supposedly waiting for some essential element that is never delivered. He tells Marlow that Kurtz is a prodigy, sent as a special emissary of Western ideals by the Company’s directors and bound for quick advancement.
Marlow realizes the brickmaker has planned on being assistant manager, and Kurtz’s arrival has upset his chances. Seeing an opportunity to use the brickmaker’s influence to his own ends, Marlow lets the man believe he really does have influence in Europe and tells him that he wants a quantity of rivets from the coast to repair his ship. Then the brickmaker leaves.
As Marlow finds his Foreman sitting on the ship he told him that they get their rivets for finishing the repair of the steamer. They have been so happy about that, but the rivets don’t come. The Eldorado Exploring Expedition, a group of white men led by the manager’s uncle arrive. This group believes in “tear[ing] treasure out of the bowels of the land”. The uncle keeps on talking to his nephew very long and Marlow gives up on ever receiving the rivets he needs to repair his ship, and turns to wondering disinterestedly about Kurtz and his ideals.

Personal Comments

At first it was very hard for me to read, I had to read some paragraphs once more and sometimes I had to look up some vocabularies. But as I started to work especially with Section 1 more intensive by the sentences the context becomes clearer. I was very impressed about the descriptions and images. The author really knows how he has to carry along his readers. I think Joseph Conrad is a very eloquent man. I think he wants the reader to be a part of the story, to play a protagonist himself. Then the reader can feel like the characters feel. If he described only the minimum nobody could feel why Marlow thinks that that something has to be strange with the office as he sees the knitting women. Nobody would know why the story about the blacks is so unjust. If you read the detailed paragraph of where the group of dying blacks near the river your heart gets touched, and you feel with them. You can’t believe how people can threat a human alive like that.
Relevant Quotations:
The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. (p. 89)
I’ve chosen this paragraph, because it shows the greed of the pilgrims to trade with the ivory.
The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled -- the great knights-errant of the sea. (p. 66)
I think this sentence is so fascinating and philosophical. It describes the rhythm of live as the tidal current.
Moreover, I think that all descriptions of light and darkness are very important for the book.


By Esmee

Source: Spark Notes